Helping companies build AI that actually works.

🙋 Ways you can help - intros to operational leaders 🙋
We’d like to speak with people with the following profile:

1/ Operational role in their business e.g. COO, Director of Operations, Chief of Staff, Head of Operations
2/ The business has >£10m annual revenue
3/ They’re in operationally heavy sectors, such as F&B or FMCG

Please get in touch if you know anyone who fits the bill!

📉 Progress in October - working on top-of-funnel 📈
Our main goal for October was to book 25 discovery calls, and we ultimately booked 20. Of the 20 booked calls, 15 were from cold calling, which was our team’s first foray into this. Once we got over the “icky” feeling and found an authentic way to speak, it was super effective! Our metrics from ~3 weeks of cold calling were:

- 1505 dials (across ~250 leads), of which…
- 156 answered the phone, of which…
- 15booked discovery calls, of which…
- 0 became new customers (yet!)

From the first ~5 discovery calls, the following themes are starting to emerge:

1/ Demand planning is a very widespread issue. Companies often struggle to predict swings in demand, which can lead to both overbuying stock and lost revenue from supply shortages. The root cause of this problem is complex, and it’s unclear whether AI is part of the solution.

2/ Manual order processing is a common pain point for F&B companies that sell B2B. This tracks with our experience from a recent consulting project, which is a good sign. However, we’re still unsure how widespread and how costly it is.

3/ Mid-market companies may not be operating at the scale to make automating internal operations, such as order processing, worthwhile. It’s consistently described as “on the roadmap” but not an immediate priority.

We haven’t yet been able to draw strong conclusions, as most of our discovery calls are scheduled for November. We’ll be digging further into the themes above.

🏹 Goal for November - commit to a narrower product 🏹
We’re learning that operational leaders aren’t looking for a horizontal platform to help with AI transformation. Instead, they’re more inclined to seek solutions for specific problems. It’s also been hard to clearly communicate how our platform can address multiple AI use cases, and puts too much work onto the customer to figure out its value.

Our main goal in November is therefore to commit to a narrower proposition, using the learnings from our discovery calls. This may focus on automating just one defined process. For example: if 15 out of 25 companies report that order processing is an immediate priority, then we’d focus on that. Our long-term vision remains to enable more widespread process automation, but our initial focus would be on automating a single process.

🙏 Shout-outs 🙏
Special thanks for September go to:

David R - for getting us over the cold calling hump
Paul F - for intros to Guillaume & Nikesh
Rod R - for inviting us onto your AMA cast
Callum NF - for an interesting F&B opportunity
Paul B - for sharing F&B insights
Benji F - for intro to Paul B
Phil P - for the invitation to speak
Lily F - for being a great co-host

En Taro Tassadar,
Artanis Team