Enterprise platforms will differentiate through specialization

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 59:32

   That notion of everything becoming the same and also your comments earlier around how many major features you guys have been shipping recently and how much that's grown has me wondering about the future of competition. I do feel like everybody is newly emboldened to go chase these adjacencies. And the more adjacencies they chase, then the more new adjacencies become available to chase. And so I do see this convergence of like all the platforms growing into the same super horizontal, everything you need in one place kind of offering.

2. 1:00:09

   And I wonder if you see that too, and if that is where you think it's going. How do we win? How does one win in that environment? Yeah, yeah. I mean, of course. Let's be clear that if you go drive the 101 freeway in San Francisco and you see all the billboards and they all say the exact same five words on it, right? Like, it's just a different logo. And for sure, I think the industry is struggling to crystallize differentiated messaging in this world.

3. 1:00:38

   And, you know, why? Look, part of it is the sea of same, right? Like so many experiences across so many dimensions today can be delivered through a conversational experience. And that's kind of one factor. It's what's behind that conversation that now is the question. How, what are the systems back there? What is the data back there? How do those things interact back there to give me more of what I want through such an experience?

4. 1:01:03

   And, you know, you're like pretty quickly you come to, well, okay, great. I need an agent platform. I need an AI builder. I need integrations to lots of things, right? Like the stuff it takes to deliver on that question is kind of some basic building blocks, right? And at the moment, a lot of platforms are rushing into that space and saying, okay, well, let's fill it up with all those things. So how will we differentiate in the future?

5. 1:01:34

   I think it's going to be really, ultimately, it's going to be specialization, right? There's going to be a common set of building blocks everybody needs. And then there's what do you get really good at? What do you optimize for? And part of that optimization will be in domains like tuning and distillation and model specificity and associated cost structures that optimize for that. I think part of that will be, you know, in industry and workflow-specific optimizations.

6. 1:02:01

   I think part – and, you know, there's going to be concentration around that gets you out of just pure horizontal. Everybody has the same stuff because everybody has the same primitives because you need primitives. But you've got to have specialization on top. So for us, a lot of that is in regulated industries where we've solved a ton of those problems in ways that we can bring to bear to this platform.

7. 1:02:22

   It's like there's 37 features that are not on that basic list that you need to actually get through the hurdle of building or deploying the first. And so I think that's going to be a big part of it in our domain. And then we've got specialization that we've built over years in banking and insurance and in government and healthcare, transportation, logistics, energy and utilities, which are all big regulated industries, all of which are the core of our installed base today.

8. 1:02:50

   where our teams have a lot of specialized skill and understanding and where we can rapidly help organizations modernize processes. And so I think it's going to be that kind of specialization, how we differentiate. At the moment, we're in the thing, we're in the point where everybody's saying, yeah, we got all the stuff. And I think we're all rapidly learning that that's just confusing everybody. Everybody's like, oh, everything's the same.

9. 1:03:19

   And so I do think we have work to do as an industry there to get our game on.