Man and Superman: The Future of Work

These days, Silicon Valley is not the darling of the world anymore. Rather, it is facing a techlash for all sorts of issues. The foremost among these is automation and the prospect of robots destroying the livelihoods of people en masse. Of Artificial Intelligence becoming a threat to humankind.

All over Silicon Valley, in Board Rooms and in private parties, the Future of Work is a much-visited topic. Almost every major company has an AI product or an AI-enabled process initiative under exploration. I have spoken with numerous entrepreneurs who actually have software products in the market that are replacing 4000-5000 jobs at each of their customer sites.

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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Gabe Larsen, VP of InsideSales Labs (Part 4)

Gabe Larsen: When we look at the data, one of the things that makes really great sellers is the ability to accurately predict forecasts. In forecasting, you hear about happy years or people sandbagging. One of my favorite things is where you have a deal and you fall in love with the deal. It moves from stage to stage almost without your knowing it. We can analyze some of the happenings of an opportunity.

In real-time, we can start to say, “The likelihood of this closing is 80% but because of the associated activities that have happened, it’s a 60% chance.” We’re hovering more on 80% to 90% accuracy range. That’s just a game-changing number.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Very interesting. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Gabe Larsen, VP of InsideSales Labs (Part 3)

Gabe Larsen: One of the things that we built into our dataset is this cross-company concept. Let’s say somebody places a phone call on our system to an individual in the East Coast, and that phone call reaches a disconnected phone number. Two days later when another rep goes to call that same phone number, the rep will be alerted that that phone number doesn’t work. I’m giving you a very tactical example.

Let’s go with Amazon. They’re doing millions and millions in transactions. In the B2B enterprise space, we’re not closing millions and millions of deals every year. I wish we were. You don’t run a Big Data play on 10 deals a quarter. That’s ridiculous. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Gabe Larsen, VP of InsideSales Labs (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to probe deeper. You’re saying that all the touch points are being captured. Are you recording the phone calls and doing speech-to-text? What is the level of capturing of the engagement?

Gabe Larsen: We do actually record phone calls. It gets interesting, especially here in the States. You have to consider the legalities. We haven’t gone as far down in analyzing the recordings. I’m going to focus on the three main pillars. Let’s start with the phone, email, and account prioritization. Those would be the three areas we’ve probably gone the deepest on.

What can you capture on the phone call? Length of call, time the call was made, what happened in the phone call. You jump >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Gabe Larsen, VP of InsideSales Labs (Part 1)

I did a startup in the area of Artificial Intelligence-driven Sales Prospecting in 1997. Much water has flown under the proverbial bridge. This discussion takes us to the state of the art, twenty years later.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to InsideSales.

Gabe Larsen: Thanks for having me. I run, what we call, InsideSales’ lab. That is our research and best practice group here at InsideSales.com. I’ve been with the company for five years in a variety of roles. Previous to InsideSales, I spent >>>

The Future of Silicon Valley

We saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi last week. It feels dated.

All these alternate realities are essentially religious stories, which is why they’ve achieved cult status.

I love Harry Potter. Some love Lord of the Rings. All good vs. evil stories in epic style.

I’m in the mood for post-religious stories.

The world isn’t black and white. It’s full of gray.

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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Sabio Mobile CEO Aziz Rahim (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are the trends in your space right now that you could point to and discuss where there may be open problems corresponding to those trends? If you were starting a new company today along the lines of those trends, what would it be?

Aziz Rahim: I think the biggest trend is the proxies that we had in advertising such as CTR are slowly going away. The norm is backend metrics and showing true conversion. In some ways, new companies should be ready to understand data and provide advertising solutions for their clients. However, at the end of the day, they should know that they are based on a new set of pretty stringent ROI parameters as opposed to proxies that have existed for so long. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Sabio Mobile CEO Aziz Rahim (Part 1)

Aziz discusses the infrastructure necessary for brands to do sophisticated mobile advertising.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Sabio Mobile.

Aziz Rahim: I’m the CEO of Sabio Mobile.

Sramana Mitra: What do you do?

Aziz Rahim: Sabio Mobile has something called App Science. Our view is that App Science is a gateway into understanding a >>>