Customer buy progress

Buying in the AI age seems simple. Its immediate value is replacing labour by executing workflows and processes with agents instead of humans.

More reasons why the value capture by companies providing AI solutions to legacy domains should be significantly better than software companies serving digital economy.

To make it concrete, agentic AI for a company’s wiki product is valuable but lower stakes in comparison to an agent that helps automate TMS workflows previously done by humans.

The challenge that I see brewing among buyers looking to invest in AI is the struggle to find the foundation among the narrative galore on Agentic AI. They also struggle to envision and tie it to a business outcome.

They keep seeing it as a play for automating and making their teams more efficient. Yet, failing to fundamentally reimagining the workflows they execute on daily basis. AI and leveraging agents should replace tasks that human do. This phenomenon is not new but with AI it is a step change.

Companies are looking for ways to improve their current performance standards and progress further. Or at least, those are the ones we encounter when selling.

When we approach sales of any new technology from the demand side, it becomes simpler to map and helps in informing the buyer. First, Bob Moesta’s Demand Side Sales 101 is a fantastic book and this illustration is from the book(or rather his blog post).

The framework says that a buying decision comes with two forces pushing towards progress and two forces pulling them and blocking the decision.

I went ahead and remixed it for an Enterprise version.

The progress a customer is likely to make is replacing human labour required execute a task. The more they can delegate to agents, the more significant their progress.

Any service provider offering Agentic AI services or tools to enterprise customers in their business category would benefit from following a demand side sales cycle.

The current interest in AI as a technology is due to the mimetic desire to experiment. The same narrative will turn if return on investment(ROI) is not visible for early adopters.

Whereas pursuit of progress is eternal. If we can tie the technology to the progress a customer could achieve, they will buy provided they had budget allocated for it.

This is one of the reasons Product Led Growth ( PLG) works only in digital services because 1 person uses it and propagates it further in the organisation.

For example, ticketing or project management system that a developer uses to build software can be adopted by team next. Such motions don’t translate for system of record software like ERP or TMS. There is effectively no PLG, only rep led sales.

And the biggest job of the rep over here is to help the buyer make the trade-off by committing to change management and wade through the uncertainty because of the potential ROI.

How to buy an AI service or tool that would deliver the prophesied return on investment (ROI)?

Start with workflows that are simple and can be delegated through and through to an AI agent. It can be a single task or sequence of tasks but once you delegate, you don’t need people overlooking the execution post tuning. If not, we enter the complicated nature of workflows which are hard for agents to navigate unlike humans.

Round up

Interview : Jonah Mcintire and Vivek

This interview is the part 1 of a two part series where I get to ask questions to one of the smartest persons in technology. I would mark both his views and his writing as underrated.

We covered a bunch of topics starting with why I believe all of Jonah’s experiences upto this moment made him the right leader to navigate a big organisation through the AI age transition.

The geekiest part for me was the discussion on Org management which is undergoing a tumultuous shift in the AI age of Software development life cycle.

Links that resonated

There are many I would like to share but I will stop myself because this one post by Prem Panicker on writing made me sit up and appreciate feature writing in journalism like never before.

India's digital dream, hacked...and what makes it great journalism

If I could get 1% as good as some of these folks that Prem refers in the post. I will forever stop writing publicly.

Sign off

Apologies for missing last week. Life has been intense lately. It feels like the season is not just of spring but of change. We are all undergoing a significant change on how and with whom we work, trying to keep abreast with all this shift can get overwhelming sometimes.

It can be challenging when it is happening on all fronts , both personal and professional. This is not me complaining or finding excuses, just documenting the overall temperature.

Simultaneously, it is also exciting because of the impact a single individual can have by wielding the new AI technology is exponential. I have been privy to it trying to a decent job at work.

Signing off till next time,

Vivek, recouping before a kicking off couple more intense weeks.