Gong’s Amit Bendov: From Meeting Recordings to Revenue AI

I get on a call with a customer, Gong already prepares me for the meeting. The way it used to work, you know, I'd get like five people from the account. We schedule like a pre meeting briefing, they prepare a document with all the questions and it's probably like five hours of some highly paid people. Now it's 30 seconds, right? It just means if I have a question, I ask. So it's a, it's a huge, huge time saver and you know, we're not even yet at like level 5 driving so the potential is like way bigger. Remember like 75% of sellers time is not customer facing. That's the data. Everything else is the opportunity size.

Hi and welcome to Training Data. Today we're excited to welcome Amit Bendav, CEO and founder of Gong, which is one of the most beloved companies in the modern day sales world and also one of the very first AI native application companies. We interviewed Amit about Gong's evolution from a wedge into a platform, specifically from a transcription tool into a broader revenue intelligence platform and heard more from Amit on his prediction for what the sales team of the future might look like and gong's role in building that future. Enjoy the show. Amit, thank you so much for joining us today. We are delighted to have you on the show. You are one of the OG AI applications and absolutely beloved company in the sales world and so looking forward to having you on training data.

I'm excited to be here.

Let's jump right in. I want to start with one of the hot topics in the AI sales world right now, which is do you believe that AI is going to take over the role of the SDR completely?

No, not in the near future, not with the current technology. I do think that a lot of the BDR work will be done by AI and it's a good thing. So it's not binary but short answer, not in the next few years, Definitely not. If it's a complex outbound sdr, AI is not going to be able to totally replace that.

Got it. Okay, follow up question. Do you think that CRM will exist in 5 years time? In a future where we have a lot of agents running around doing a lot of sales related activity? What is the role of the CRM in that future?

Yeah, I'm sure CRM will exist in 20 years. It's not going away. There's so much built in there. Just like mainframes are still there. Even though there's much better technology, I don't believe that in managing customers CRM is going to be at the epicenter. We're moving from a CRM centric world to more like AI centric world. CRM manages customers, their data and a lot of other things, but it's not managing the operations, the activities and how to engage customers. So that's for sure. It's still there. People tend to underestimate how much there is in CRM. There's quite a bit and it definitely will live for a while.

Amit, in that AI centric world, what is the role of the software? What is the role of the humans?

The role of the software we're starting to understand the role of the human is actually less clear and I think we will be surprised. It's hard to predict what it will be. I'm sure it'll change. There are roles to date. Prompt Engineer is the obvious one that we couldn't even imagine. Three years ago, SDR did not exist. People ask. It did not exist 30 years ago. Like this is like a modern invention and it might go away. So to be like different roles, you know, I'd say in general, the current technology, anything's based on transformer is fit for certain types of work. It cannot replace humans. Whenever there's like accountability or decision making or creativity, we're not even close to that. Right. So humans will still be in control, I believe, for a while. But AI can do a lot of the work. So, you know, definitely I could do an amazing job reviewing a contract right now and redlining all the hot topics, even suggesting correction. Right. We would not let AI sign a contract or even send a contract or send a proposal. Right. There's always like a lawyer that will need to do that. So I think the roles will shift to humans that are augmented and using AI as a tool for, you know, quite a few tasks. You know, in our industry specific, there is this number that goes around that 75% of what sellers are doing is non selling activity. So three out of four dollars that we're paying them is to do admin and non essential work. All of that could be replaced by AI. That. That'll be pretty exciting.

Amit, take us back to 2015 when you founded Gong Meeting Transcription. Like why did you start with that? And was the vision always to build a meeting transcription tool or to build something very different from that?

No, actually the vision was never about transcription. When I started a company, we were like my previous company before starting Gong, we were recording calls and I was using a transcription service. The real reason I didn't want to read transcript. There's so many of them going on. Who has the time to do it? I have a little bit of an add as well. So I'm not the person to either listen at great lengths or read. I wanted something that would take all the information and translate in structured data. Transcription is just a way in the process, in the pipeline that you need to capture the audio and video transcribe, then identify topics and themes and other things and then use it in structured data. So that was the idea. We started with meetings because that was kind of the big black hole. We could kind of see other things that are happening and activity. But this is like very rich data set that we knew nothing about and nobody was doing anything. So that's why we started with that.

Amit. I remember in those early days there was this period of time where GONG was one of many. And then it felt from the outside looking in, it felt almost overnight. All of a sudden GONG was one of one. What did you guys get so right in those early days?

I actually think we have like more competition right now. And I always tell the team the more successful we are, we're going to have more. So if you look at when we started, we thought that we were alone because there are other companies in sales. We didn't know about it. Thank God we didn't know. But we found that there are like two others now there are dozens of companies and I hope to have like hundreds like in a few years. Like if you look at how many companies are in CRM, there are hundreds. So if the market grows, there's an opportunity. But that's a very important question. There is never like a moment. There are always moments where people predicted our death or doom or whatever. So 20, I think 2017 or something. So we didn't know that we have competition. Like I, I started going because I said, oh, like I have this problem, I'm scratching my own itch. Nothing exists. Maybe we should start a company. And then I found there's another company that was like better funded, like a little bit ahead of us, you know, maybe like cooler technology. And when I, when I realized that I, I, I still have the recording from our all hands. We were like a very small company at the time. But by the end of this year there's only one goal that matters. We're going to be number one or nothing else matters. Like I'm not interested in this company if we're not number one clear leader. So like in SaaS there is no second prize, at least nothing that I'm interested in. And we have to be. And we decide, define metrics first, how much we're going to win. And second, it's not us. We're going to be the undisputed leader. So we even put metrics like how much media share or LinkedIn or social media share. And we wanted to have 2x all the others combined. That was the goal. Right. And we hit it. And first the gaps first, it's like very neck to neck. Then you get a little win. It's very hard. And I think we started a little behind, but the strong get stronger. Once you start opening a gap of like, you know, let's say 5, 10%, it becomes easier. The sales people become more confident, customers start to see, and then the gap widens and then you get new competitors. So we started there was like course and execvis, and none of them is an independent company. Then people said, okay, like outreach and sales loft are going to eat you. When we, before we raised money said Google and Amazon are going to eat you. So there's always like competition, but you absolutely have to win. It's very hard at first, but once you start opening the gap, it gets easier. And then you get new competitors. So you're never alone. If you're alone, you're in trouble. You're in the wrong market.

I mean, my view as the person on the sidelines who was doing the investment memo work at the time was the thing that you all did that was really special was you won the hearts and minds of your customer and you were really, really customer focused. And this was at the time, meaning transcription was kind of new. Ish. A lot of the models weren't that state of the art yet. And so a lot of the other companies were thinking technology out and you were really going customer back and you knew how to win over those hearts and minds. And I think to this day, that is the thing that is so special about gong. You go talk to any sales rep, sales team, it's like it's gong, Gong, Gong. And they, you know, they get googly eyes when they think about you.

Absolutely. That's. That. That's a great point, Sonia. Thank you. Like, it's not that. Yeah. The fact that you want to win doesn't win the battle. Right. You have. You have to do it the right way. And we're always looking at customer problems that we can solve better than anyone else and always looking ahead. And our goal is always to be almost like every two years to be a new company. I'm a big Beatles fan. Sorry, that's my age. And I told the team, I always tell them that I want to be like the Beatles every two years. It's almost like a new band, totally different kind of music. And I said, if we don't do it, we're dead. So. So if all we do like meeting recording today, we'd be dead because like, oh, that's like everybody can do that. So we always have to reinvent, take great care of customers. And people think the competition is like a zero sum game, almost like a football, like, you know, like bowl possession and all of that. It's more like an Easter egg hunt, right? If you see don't know where all the other kids are running, just find the ones that are your own that nobody's seeing and get as many of them as you can.

I just watched my toddler try to do his first Easter egg hunt. He did not find very many of those. So when you started the company, this was a pre OpenAI or pre chatgpt era at least and there weren't really great foundation models to build upon. And so I remember back when we invested, you had a very state of the art kind of model research lab in Israel that was doing a lot of speech to text and model technology. To what extent was that a source of competitive advantage for you then and is it still a source of competitive advantage for you today?

Great question. So we went back and forth on this, I think like two or three times that I'm still not sure we've seen the last chapter in this. So when we started, we did not have our transcription engine. We're using just like a web API. I was at the opinion we should have one. It's so core to what we do. But Elon, my co founder, the smarter half, said no, like it's, we're only like 6 million. I don't want to like invest in something like it like you know, 3% more accuracy. Let's see what people want to buy first, develop the app and then once we raise more money, we develop. So we started with something that's really not. It was an okay service, just duct tape it to and got to the application and got the first thing that actually works and we saw what was important. Our competitors were investing a lot in like real time transcription and all the cool technology that never made like a real difference for customers. So I'm glad in hindsight that I listened to Elon and we didn't burn our serious a money on a transcription ending. But then once we started, you're right at that Time we had to rely on things like Nuance, right, Which was like very expensive and people don't even know what it is today. But and, and not great. So we decided to now we can invest. We started our own team. We hired some of the best speech people like in Israel and there are quite a few of them and develop our own. And it was like better quality and a lot cheaper. So that was a competitive advantage. And now we used, we use anything from some of the Amazon services and Whisper for some of the things. We still have our own models for some languages where the others don't do a good enough job, but if they do, we'll be happy to switch to service. Like our transcription is not our core competency. We're very good at this, but we're at the AI application layer. This is very low level that we do. It's like a car battery, right? If, if we can't find something, we'll develop it, but if we can find something better and cheaper, we'll use it.

I'm glad you brought up Real Time transcription because that was one of those, I remember from the technology out, that was one of those. Of course GONG should go in that direction. And I think you stuck to your conviction on that's not what our customer wants. And so even though that may be the cooler technology, this is what our customer wants is actually coaching workflows and the ability to analyze competitor mentions after the fact. And so that I think is a great example of thinking customer back versus technology out.

Yes, yes, absolutely. We have like since we started, every time we're always asked about real time, which is like, you know, it makes like total sense, right? Except that the technology doesn't really work to this day and the value is questionable. Right. So we still have not, not seen it like in action, like in, in a great way.

I want to talk about generative AI. And so you started this company back in the days of what I would call predictive or analytical AI. And a lot of the value is in that, you know, how many times are your competitors being mentioned? You know, if you talk about this feature first, do your win rates go up? And I think a lot of the value is in that. Tell me about what you see as, you know, the opportunity for GONG in a kind of generative AI technology era.

Well, I mean these are exciting days. And when we started company 2016 to even 2015, we started to think about it. We. The model that we used is a self driving car, right? Autonomous system and self driving car of like five Levels, level five being like fully self driving and level one is kind of like alerts of sorts.

Right.

And we envision an autonomous application that runs a revenue organization that you tell what my revenue goals is and I need to understand how to break it down to goals and how to help from the leaders to the individual sellers, how to run the things. That was like total science fiction. The technology didn't exist back then. It still doesn't fully exist. There are still components that are, that are missing. But every time we're able to, every time we assess what's real today, what's available, what's the state of the art, not the hype, what we can really do reliably and create a great customer experience that we can stand behind and integrate into our solution. And generative AI was a game changer. Things like summarizing calls is something that we wanted to do in 2016. I actually hired a news editor, a TV news editor and I wanted to see, because we wanted to take, okay, take like 60 minutes and create like a 30 second newsreel like you do on TV or sports, right. And I paid someone, I gave a recording, said okay, why don't you create something for me? And we did probably like 20, 20 attempts. And I gave up because they're not, they're not good. And you understand that actually summarizing you already, it's already biased in some way. So now you could do it like super easy. So it creates like a ton of value. Some of the holy grail apps that people ask for, you know, tell me what's going on with this account. So now I could just ask like we're at the end of our quarter right now, so I could log in and just say hey, like how is this deal progressing? Like what could make it go wrong? Like can I, can I help with anything? I'll tell you, it's pretty, pretty amazing on the market side. It provided like a huge tailwind for us. So we're grateful not just for the technology, but what it did in market awareness. So when we started GONG is, is, is an AI company or an AI application company more precisely. But we, we never spoke about it like it was like third level messaging, that this is like AI technology because it would scare the heck out of people. So especially we sell to non technical people. We sell to CROs and business users that aren't super technical. So if you talk about AI, that seems like scary in science fiction. So it was like third level messaging. You had to double click like at least a couple times. But now we got a lot of people calling us. Hey, my CEO was asked on an earning call if they plan to increase or how are they going to plan to increase sales productivity with AI? Do you have something with AI? So the openness and the excitement and chatgpt made it so accessible at a consumer level. That's super exciting.

On that note, I think a lot of companies boards are focused top down on how AI is changing productivity metrics. And I think in coding for example, it's been pretty exciting to see a lot of companies are now reporting 20 to 30% increases in engineering velocity and metrics like that. What have you seen on the sales side? What has been the impact of using AI for your customers?

In the revenue orgs we've seen dramatic changes. So some of our customers have seen as much like 60% more sales capacity. And just by you can measure it lots of different ways. Let's say a person can handle 50 accounts now they can do 100 accounts. So that's like just by saving all the time. So a lot of the tasks are just becoming redundant. Even like you don't need to talk to as many people anymore. Not there's the fun part of talking to other people but not like what happened, what I'm going to do because now everything is visible. I get on a call with a customer gong already prepares me for the meeting. So I don't need to call the account team. Usually the way it used to work, you know, I'd get like five people from the account. We'll schedule like a pre meeting briefing. They prepare a document with all the questions and it's probably like five hours of some highly paid people. Now it's 30 seconds, right? It just means to read. If I have a question, I ask. So it's a, it's a huge, huge time saver. And you know, we're not even yet at like level 5 driving so the potential is like way bigger. If you remember like 75% of sellers time is not customer facing. That's the data. Everything else is the opportunity size.

What level are we at today and what's the path to getting to level five?

It depends. So there are different components like for example at gong, so some are at level two and some are level three and some are at level four. Level four is almost like driving. So if I, you know, let's say I get on a call with the customer gong would also create like the email for me but I have to click send. So this is like level four. It's almost like I'm in control, which is smart. That's level four. Level five is when it'll send the email on my behalf. It'll take a little bit of time. Some things are easier than others and something are not, not as mission critical. Right. If I, if you want to do people, everybody talk about like outbound SDRs, right? Cold calling. This is a pretty poor choice for current state of AR because first, it's hard, it's very hard for people to do it. Second, if it goes wrong, right. It's very damaging to your brand. Right. As we've seen. If you've seen some of the cursor service agent, you know, changing privacy policy or airlines. So I wouldn't let like AI talk to my customers like except for like very simple cases like support tickets that are pretty confined but not anything that is complex. So for those it's still going to be level four until we get conviction that the technology can be 100% trusted. But some, some areas are, you know, if it's not, for example, now we have like role playing, right? AI, you could just practice, do practice call with AI and it'll, it'll give you feedback, right? If this thing doesn't work 100%, it's no big deal. Like, yeah, like a little bit annoying, but you're not embarrassed in front of customers.

Is that with like a virtual avatar?

Yes, yes, yes.

Oh, super cool.

Yes.

The comment on, until it's 100% trusted, do you think people, or I guess in terms of what you've observed with your customers and the users of the product, do people hold AI to a higher standard than they hold themselves? I would guess most of Those Reps or BDRs or SDRs are not 100% all the time.

Yes and no. So the yes, actually fun fact, like when we started gong, we actually did not show the transcription. All right, so you couldn't see the transcription was there. But someone advised us like a smart person that did it, like another application, don't show the transcript because it's 70% accurate. Which means like 3 out of 10 words will be wrong. When someone reads that, it'll just be an awful user experience. So we hid it, we allowed them to search, we showed some things and now people are super happy. But we couldn't show the thing because it just wasn't good. So people do expect perfection with AI. You know, someone self driving a Tesla makes an accident, right? It's major headlines, right? But you know, people make so many more accidents. Like nobody talks about that said, I Do see that the reactions to. For example, when people ask questions at Gong or they get the summaries or they get. Everybody's very excited. They know it's not perfect. Like it's you know, maybe 80, 85% correct. But the value, because it's so fast, right. And so easy. I don't see a lot of people complaining. So I think people are able to tolerate somewhat lower quality for ease of use. So for example, when I, when I was a teenager, right, we had like hi Fi systems, right? That's how you listen to music and like either like on headphones or like on mono, just one speaker, right? How can you listen to that? Just poor audio quality, right? But it's so easy that people are willing to put up with the simpler and easier technology. And this is like definitely a lot simpler. So we see a lot of. Generally the sentiment is very positive.

I have no idea what a hi FI system is.

Yes, I bought. My wife wanted to kill me, but I bought like major speakers in our basement and. And she said you did what? Yeah, but I just missed that, that audio quality.

Love it. I mean, what's your take on agents and how are you guys approaching agents? Building selling agents.

At Gong, we think agents are real. They're again like a lot of other things. There is a bit like inflated expectations right now. It's like it's going to do everything. So, so everybody like excuse me, agents aren't taking your job anytime soon, but they can definitely take parts of your job, the parts that you don't like doing. And it's a waste of your time. So the approach that we're taking is like task specific agents. They're not developed like do anything. There's no writing code. So we have for example like we spoke about like briefer, right? So here's like brief me for encounter. There is an agent that trained for this task. It has parameters and it's built in the workflow, right? So that's. And we have dozens of them. That's the approach that we believe are great for enterprise applications. General purpose are very hard to nail because they could go in all sorts of directions, but it's a real thing. Also interesting the line between like simple automation and agents like isn't clear if you look at it. Some of them like it's something. It's the same thing, but it's also very different. So the question can they make decisions again for non critical decision decisions that aren't like, like a huge deal, they can definitely do a great job. But agents can definitely do quite a bit of our work, have the newer.

Model capabilities and in particular the reasoning models have those unlocks new capabilities for gong.

Not yet. I think that there's a line that I'm not sure that even like transformer technology is capable of which is like can you rely 100% of something that will be true? Right. Just truthfulness, like not 99%. 100%. So there is a category of work that has to be. You send a proposal to a customer that can't be like 99%. Right. If it's like 1% of the cases and you send something is like totally wrong pricing or over discounting or something as like a hallucination. So even with the reasoning it's getting better. So I think it increases the classes of tasks that are, that make sense. But if you talk like AGI or things that are, that are absolutely like must happen. You know, calculate commissions to sellers. Right. You get it wrong. It's, it's, it's very bad. Right. So I think it's, it's, it's a quantitative improvement still not a qualitative. Qualitative. That's 100 trusty. And that'll be some would say even if it's like, you know, Jan Lecun or David Deutsch, they'll say like it's, it's not even with the realm of transformer technology because of the statistical nature of the approach.

Do you agree with Jan's take?

Yes, but I also know there's a possibility that maybe like, and he's like much smarter than I am. That we're not seeing that someone would prove us wrong. Which would be great. But yeah, right now there's also an issue of accountability and both legal, but also from a work perspective. For example, GONG now has the ability to update all opportunity records, for example. So that's a no brainer. Right. Nobody needs to log into CRM and update fields anymore. Some companies still want the seller to say yes, yes, yes, yes. Because otherwise they can blame AI for. Oh, I didn't say that. Right. It's like AI and AI could be wrong. Right. It's like the risk of error. So there's a different analog computer and a digital computer. Right. Digital computer has error correction, which means, you know, if a message was sent right over a line, there's errors. It'll get there exactly as it is. Right. And transformer, maybe it'll be enhanced in a way that we're not thinking about it. It'll take like different kind of technology to get there. My two cents.

Yeah. What do you think the sales team of the future is going to look like? And maybe you don't have a high fidelity point of view on that but how quickly do you think the composition, the team composition of a sales team is going to change? If you take the software engineering world as analogy, I think that's changing rapidly in terms of size of software engineering teams, skill sets. How quickly do you think the sales world is going to change?

By contrast, it's already changing. I think that it'll, it'll be gradual. So there are seemed that you know, very transactional sales for example. But you know I want to buy an iPhone or something that'll go first because that, that could certainly be automated or I want to upgrade my cellular plan or whatever it is right that that can be handled. Complex things like I want to buy a house or a mortgage or enterprise software that that's more complicated. But I do not see people doing clerical work, right? Just updating forms. I do not see the traditional forecasting. I do think that there are things that are some very far reaching consequences. Right right now people are doing manual forecasting, right? I don't think that's necessary because software, an AI can do a way better job. All things, you know, companies have sales stages in the process. Every company is, you know, they're five or six stages. You don't really need that. That's a management tool for that was created like you know, 50 years ago so we can get some visibility to where the process is. But actually everything can be done way smarter with AI. So I think the process can change the people can change people would we see great adoption of the technology because again it's so easy that it's cross generational right now that people are very eager and sometimes their imagination is even faster than our speed of development or oh, can you do this? Can you do that? So people are very eager and I think that they'll be augmented by our, the BDR role. I'm not sure that it'll be, it'll be around. Not necessarily because the software is going to replace but sellers could do their own thing right if they have the right tools. So fewer people could do more work. Remember BDR did not exist 30 years ago. It was created for fast hyper growth SaaS companies. Most companies in the world don't have that. So I think we can augment the sellers and they'll be able to address a lot more customers.

I mean it's easy to imagine that sales team of the future Being smaller on balance than the sales teams of the present, each individual is far more productive because of wonderful tools like GONG that give them superpowers. The thing I'm curious about is for you as a business, you create a lot of value with the product that you offer. You capture that value today, I believe primarily through a seat based pricing model. If there's this countervailing force on seats, which is ironically, you're making people more productive, therefore they need fewer seats over time, how does your pricing and packaging evolve? How do you capture more of that value that you're creating if seats aren't going up as fast as they might have historically?

That's a. I love the question, Pat. So there are multiple forces. First, I'm not sure there'll be fewer sellers, they'll be different. But the economy grows, kind of GDP grows over time. There'll be products and services we're not imagining right now that are, that will be there. So it's not necessarily like fewer people, but people will be more efficient. But we will start to add the consumption level or usage pricing. Like this year we're coming with an orchestration product that will be a great fit. When we started Gong, actually we asked people like, do you want to do it like based on usage or based on seats? And most people that we surveyed, most buyers said oh, per seat right now because they use like CRM as an anchor point, right? And we didn't want to innovate on too many fronts. So we said, okay, we innovate in the product pricing will keep it like simple. But we always, and probably in the pitch deck like from serious B or whenever we did, we said like this will be AI will be bigger than cloud, right? Because cloud is an IT revolution and AI is a work revolution. So we never saw ourselves as software company, but more like a BPO. And, and, and, and the potential is 10 times bigger because if you take, you know, most sales tax like you know, thousand dollars a seat and I think it could easily be like, you know, thousand or, or, or more per month. Because if you think of how many, you know, people are making 200,000 or costing $200,000 a year, you save 70% as 140,000, right? You take 10% of that is still a bargain for the CFO, right? And the company. So the potential is absolutely there. Whether it's like usage base or just hiring higher per seat pricing, it has to be aligned with the value. But I think the world is more ready now to look at value pricing.

I want to Do a quick aside from AI for a second because I think that GONG is one of the only company that's really, you know, re inflected revenue growth at pretty meaningful scale. Talk. Talk to us about what it was like going through, you know, sales tech winter over the last several years and how you made it through to the other side and any lessons for other founders.

Do we really want to get into that? Sonia, like it was like so early 2023. You're really facing like a tough, tough headwind, right? The market was, was, was tanking. It was like this perfect storm everything. And we, we almost came to, to a halt. Very challenging and demoralizing to the team. And you know, when customers they say we love you but we're, we're leaving or some companies going out of business. So it was, it was tough. But I never lost conviction that we can turn this around right. And we started rolling our sleeves and got to work. So we launched two new, two new products. Forecast and engaged like in, in. In great speed. Fortunately, we had enough money so we, we raised a lot of money. We never burnt a lot of money. So when we always need people ask why are you raising it says this is like for a rainy day. That we didn't know when it's going to come, but we knew it will, right? So we decided that where everybody were laying off people who said this is an opportunity for us. It'll be harder for the competition. Now we're going to keep the foot on the gas pedal. That's one second. We improved our act when we sell. We had to create like a, like a bulletproof business case that a CFO would approve. It's not just, just that, you know, bygone because it's cool and it'll change your life. So it has to show real value how we support customers. And we tried a lot of things and you don't see immediate impact. Some of the things that you're doing, it might take like two or three quarters. So you're experimenting with quite a few things and nothing seems to be working. So it's very, very challenging situation. But the team was able to turn it around. So all these things eventually the product, beefing up the product suite, improving our game. And fortunately ChatGPT came out and it gave us a huge boost. There are a lot of people who spelled like the death of gong. Oh, now everybody can do. Can do a generative AI will make everything possible. That was slightly exaggerated. So but that actually gave us like a, a really nice tailwind because customers Saw like a lot more value in the solution solution. So all these things together helped us turn it around and now we're, we're accelerating. I don't know when this will be aired, but even like this quarter is even like faster than the, the previous quarter. Sony, I'll give you like a love it early look. Yeah, yeah, it's so we had, it's now seven consecutive quarters like the of accelerating and you know, we, we hope we have not seen the end.

I mean I think you're grit and the way that you dug in and just led the company through that period and never lost any confidence whatsoever in the full vision for what Gong could become. I think I have huge respect and admiration, we all do, for how you weathered that storm. And I think you've now earned the right to really go big and go pursue that big ambition. Should we close it out with some rapid fire questions?

Oh, I'm nervous. But yeah, bring it on.

Okay. These are intended to be like one word or one sentence answers whatever comes to mind quickly. Okay. Favorite new AI application in your personal life or at work other than gong.

Chatgpt.

Easily.

I use it like 15 times a day. Easily. Yeah, yeah, for everything. I don't want to tell you for what, but yeah.

All right, how about one piece of advice for founders who are building AI companies at the application layer.

Keep your eyes on the customer, talk to customer, don't believe your investors, the influencers, all of that. I love you all. Just talk to customers, see what they really need. Be the fastest thing that works now, not like in two years where the hype is just follow, keep your eyes on the ball. Love it.

I don't love that so much. I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

It was rapid. If you give me a little more time, maybe I'll give you more politically correct.

I'm completely kidding. In two or three years time, will we have virtual avatars actually selling to customers directly? Yes or no?

Yes, yes, yes. I think for simple products, yeah, that's definitely a possibility.

About one recommended piece of content for people who are interested in AI. Something they should read or listen to.

Just, you know, just following your interest. I'm not loyal to any one source. I listen to all kind of things. I just put like my interest on YouTube and that's how I find information and look at it. I do like the Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. It's not the easiest read, but this book, it's not just on AI, but it talks about what's next. Like AI is part of it. And this is like a mind changing book in my mind.

I mean do you think AI is capable of fully autonomously signing a call it million dollar contract? And what year will that happen?

Not in the next like three to five years. In my opinion. You'll it'll need something that is beyond Transformers, something that that is not like an analog computer is more digital that can be relied 100% so. And I don't know what it is and I don't know that anyone knows today what it is but it'll take like different level of technology. This is recorded. So let's put something on a calendar for like three to five years and see if I was wrong or right.

Let's do it. I think you've tended to be right whenever we disagreed in the past. Thank you so much for joining us today. We really enjoyed the discussion and congratulations on persevering through sales Tech Winter and making it through to this very exciting time for AI and for the world.

Well, it was fun. Thank you so much, Sam.