What's Next with Generative AI for B2B?
Notes from a recent in-person summit with the CEO of HubSpot and Zoom
Last week on Thursday, May 25th, HubSpot, Zoom, and Fellows Fund, all hosted a phenomenal event on Generative AI: open or closed - really the timing could not have been better.
If you’re a listener of the All-In podcast, you have no doubt noticed these topics and deep dives the past few weeks.
You also may have noticed Sam Altman was called to present to Congress.
Suffice it to say, this year has felt like the Wave of AI has come crashing on the shore - and now we all are staring in shock at what has washed up.
The event packed a serious group of leaders with companies like Anthropic, Zoom, HubSpot, and OpenAI, all in attendance.
The keynote session features the CEO of HubSpot, Yamini Yangan and of Zoom, Eric Yuan and was hosted amicably by Founding Partner of Fellows Fund, Alex Ren.
Here were some of the prominent questions and my notes on their response. These are not direct quotes.
Q: How has AI been used and how is it changing at your companies:
For Yamini (CEO of HubSpot) the answer was - a big shift.
I’m paraphrasing here in italics:
6 months ago we had a small team dedicated to looking into this and seeing what is possible. Now fast forward to today, if you talk with any Product Manager or team lead, you’ll see that we are baking AI and the value that we believe we can deliver into our platform and each and every product. It won’t be something that is a standalone product but it will be inside of our core offering.
An example may be a great Marketer who can now be more effective and generate a Blog post, an image, and a call to action, all within their workflow.
For a Salesperson, they may be able to move faster and go spend more time with their top customers. Notes and key items will be saved into CRM.
For Eric (CEO of Zoom) the answer was - AI has been a part of our play already and it will continue:
Things like auto virtual backgrounds, meeting Summaries, these are coming out soon and we already have them in Beta. What’s next will be to pop up a “catching up a late participant” so if you arrive late to a call, you see the recap of a blurb of what’s happened so far on the side of your screen”.
Q: How will Models and LLMs be used within your companies tech?
The Zoom CEO made an interesting call out that their vision is to have a open module or ability to bring your own data as a Plug In, so it may aid or assist the participants during the live call but it was unclear how that would look or work
The HubSpot CEO, she made a different comment about Open or Closed and talked about how the Closed nature of HubSpot’s own data or client CRM data, was opening up an interesting moment where any HubSpot user will start to be able to Toggle On or Off, the ability for your actions or searches or instruction to start aiding the Models or to keep a clear divide to sort of isolate your own data.
On this piece, I think a lot of users and teams will need to learn more, be educated and shown how that works, and we’ll see a new common UI or toggle button that many companies start to bake into their core platforms.
Q: Who will win - incumbents or startups…?On this point, they took differing views, the CEO of Zoom joked about how he would be starting a new startup or said this is the ideal time to go for it.
The CEO of HubSpot laid out clear steps where a incumbent has the Data advantage and will have private Data that is important to consider.
Q: Should this be Regulated?
The CEO from HubSpot was most clear on this point, that Yes, there should be regulation.
Q: What will happen to work and the way we view a weekly schedule and current roles.
The CEO of HubSpot stated the classic line: I truly believe AI will not replace a Salesperson, but a Salesperson using AI will replace one who is not. But she did not go into specifics about a change to our weekly schedules.
The CEO of Zoom however went with a comedy note and shared, he is ready for more vacations and looks forward to it happening, and if the 30% figure is correct, he would be happy to see 30% or more of his week get cut.
He went deeper saying he sees a world where we all mostly work 3 or 4 days a week tops.
This image in particular struck me, I love the concept of the Flywheel and the output of AI enhancements being, to aid the customer - enabling success on their end-goal.
This event took place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA and it was really well run.
Great speakers, great agenda, and a nice set up for networking and at a world class venue.
No doubt, this event just started to build upon the conversation and in the coming months there will be much more opinion and development.
What’s your take?
I don’t mean to drop into pitch mode, but I was representing Salesroom - a new conversational intelligence and enablement platform for AEs & CSMs at the event. We recently just got featured in the HubSpot App Marketplace.
So if your team uses HubSpot (or SFDC for CRM) they should be considering Salesroom as a more premium experience for meetings and customer calls.
And hey if the idea of AI and Live Enablement sounds intriguing, Salesroom is hosting an open product tour, which you can attend on Thursday June 1st, at 11am PST.
Grab your seat here ←
So there you have it, a quick re-cap from the Gen AI summit. Feel free to share this if you think others would enjoy and be sure you are on our list for monthly updates where I share New SaaS trends, Job Postings, and all things PLG.