Serval combines release gates with customer-led productization

Transcript

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

1. 17:25

   If there's a premise that, I mean, there's a bunch of different ideas here, but one is that. you know, exceptions or access control is going to get complex and require a different level of scale, right? Another is that you're just going to have more automations overall because people, you know, if you make it easy, people are going to extend in all different places. Are there like core design principles beyond code generation should be the actual form of automation that you have put into the product today that reflect that? I think the biggest one is the software development lifecycle, something that we take for granted in engineering context of the, hey, there's actually like a dev environment and then there's staging and then there's prod and there's like these gates between them. And maybe you've got, you know, branches that people can develop

2. 18:11

   on that's not going to harm the other systems. And sorry, just to be clear, that's not how IT automation works today. It does in some cases, but I think most new AI products are not embracing that. They're basically saying, hey, let's build these cool agents and ship to production. But this idea of, hey, you have to actually follow an SDLC process if you're a large enterprise. A large financial institution is not just going to ship new agent capabilities without a review and user acceptance testing and all of these.

3. 18:39

   Appliance checks. Exactly. And so I think that's something we think about a lot is what is going to convince the largest companies in the world to adopt this technology, not just what is powerful and cool and something we're excited to get in the hands of customers. Feels like it takes a lot of AI companies, particularly if they're vertically centric, a year or two to figure this out, sometimes longer.

4. 18:54

   And it's interesting to watch the whole industry now adopting both the forward deployed motion, starting to think through software development lifecycle, compliance, other aspects of the enterprise in a way that was almost missing. I think in some cases they never get there. Like some companies just, they look at what enterprise software takes and they decide we don't really want to build that. And it takes, you know, you look at the story of a lot of these companies that we mentioned earlier that have gone down market.

5. 19:17

   I think sometimes they do look at the opportunity to go and build for the enterprise And it requires a whole different set of building principles and products that you have to build. And some just don't choose to do it. And they cede that ground to other companies. And we've chosen to say, like, hey, give me your gnarliest problems. And we're going to solve them and make AI transformations possible in this crazy world, in this world of risk and governance concerns.

6. 19:43

   When you have your, you know, deployment sort of in customer environment engineers and then ongoing automation specialists and then you have the core platform, how do you decide what is actually brought into the core platform or, you know, in every individual customer's environment? So when we deploy these software engineers, I think what's really important is we actually never build custom features.

7. 20:05

   We don't build bespoke product capabilities. And luckily for our category, no one asks us to. Everything that people ask for is something that every other customer is going to want at some point. Maybe they impact the prioritization, but it's still something we've always wanted in the platform. Now, because it is a co-gen platform on the hood, what you build in Serval is very, very unique. So the password reset workflow for one company is going to be very different, shockingly, than the password reset for another.

8. 20:29

   Same with offboarding and offboarding and all these different automations internally, they look very different. But that's just baked into the core primitives of the platform. Serval almost becomes the IDE, right, for the IT department and other departments to build their automations and manage them at scale. So what we do do is if we look and we see the same customer building the same automations over and over and over again, and having to customize them and build them in the product in the same way, we start to consider, hey, should that be a first-class feature in the product?

9. 20:57

   So one example is we saw a lot of customers building workflows to detect knowledge-based articles that were conflicting or out of date. And so we said, hey, we should just do that automatically. And we had customers that would set up automations to reclaim old licenses. So licenses for software you're paying for that no one is using, let's automatically cancel those subscriptions. Well, we just decided to build that on the platform.

10. 21:23

    So it is a way for us to kind of test the waters of what should be really first-class features versus what should stay as automations in Zervil.