← No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
AI Agents Talking to AI Agents: Reinventing Commerce with Decagon CEO Jesse Zhang
00:31:22
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- [00:06]
Host
Today we're lucky to have with us on no Prior is Jesse Zhang. Jesse is the co founder and CEO of decagon, which provides customer service and other related AI for all sorts of different enterprises, including banks, telecom providers, airlines, and of course many of the biggest and most important tech companies. Jesse Pryor started Loki, which was acquired by Niantic and we're very excited to have him join us today on Empires. Jesse, thanks for joining us today on Empires.
- [00:29]
Jesse Zhang
Thanks for having me.
- [00:30]
Host
Can you tell us a little about decagon and why you started the company, how you started it, how you all got going?
- [00:35]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, of course. So decagon, for those who are not really familiar with us, we're an AI customer service agent and so you can kind of think of us if we're working with a large bank or airline or just people that have large contact volume. The AI's job is to have a very engaging and personalized conversation with the user and resolve it and save the company a bunch of money and ideally drive more revenue in the future because folks are more engaged. And as we've grown it's kind of becoming more and more of a. You got to think of like a conversational UI for the brand where it's how every user can interact with it. And we often use the term like concierge to describe this, but that's what we do.
- [01:12]
Host
And you're working right now with some big banks or some of the world's biggest banks. You're working with airlines, telcos, like you've actually gotten to very big customers very quickly. How did you go about doing that or how did it happen?
- [01:22]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, so I mean, as you know, we started out mostly with the like digital native companies. A lot of startups do that. And digital natives of course are much more willing to try out startups, they.
- [01:30]
Host
Can move faster, late stage tech companies.
- [01:32]
Jesse Zhang
And things like that. Yeah, like rippling notion folks like them, they were like great partners and they also just helped us iterate on the product a lot. So that's where we started. As we've gone on, I think just naturally we were kind of pulled up market just because of the demand. And as you might imagine, that's where most of the large contact volumes are. So it just happened a lot faster than we thought. And I would say a lot of these enterprises also moved a lot faster than we would have expected. So that's why we ended up there.
- [02:01]
Host
I think that's one of the underappreciated things about AI traction is a lot of companies are willing to try things in a way they weren't willing to before because it's such a big technology shift. And so all these markets are kind of open now that weren't before or that would be much harder to do.
- [02:14]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, I mean another specific dynamic is that at the enterprise it's becoming a lot more of a top down motion. So in the past any of these technologies could have been just like one team trying to vet it or decide it, but now it's like a, it's an AI transformation and the C suite, the board are all like very big on how do we adopt AI? And customer service is often one of the biggest areas, probably the most low hanging fruit. So that's how these conversations have progressed.
- [02:42]
Host
And how much of an impact are you having in terms of some of these teams? So I know that you're giving a lot of leverage to these customer service orgs. Are you making people two times more productive or. I'm just sort of curious, is there a way to measure the outcome here?
- [02:53]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, most of the large enterprises, the first thing they'll measure is just what is the, I guess like efficiency that you're gaining them. So whatever they're spending on their contact center or their operation, how much can you cut that down by? And we've done case studies now where folks have been able to cut that down by 60, 70%. Oh wow, that's like a great success case. Right. Because it's like a very clear business case you can show to everyone and then the sort of secondary thing. Oftentimes folks will even put this at the same level, if not higher, as just the customer satisfaction. So you need to measure that and make sure that your customers are having a good time and more engaged, if not just more, also just happy than previously.
- [03:33]
Host
So you're basically providing these customer service AI agents, workflows that help, I guess, function 24, seven in multiple different languages out of the box. And do you basically do a lot of integrations into what they are already providing or how do you tend to work with folks?
- [03:49]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, I think the way you should think about agents here are that that it's more of a substitute for the mundane human labor. So whatever systems they're already using, generally an AI agent, at least when you first deploy, is not going to disrupt the tooling you currently have. So whatever CRM they're using, whatever telehealth stack, we will just integrate with that and then it's kind of doing all the tasks you would expect a human to do. And over time that just continues Scaling and so one of the benefits of AI agents is that they're always on either awake 24 7. You don't have to train them really. There's no churn, you can just scale them out.
- [04:25]
Host
And then you confounded this with Ashwin and you are both second time founders. What made you decide to work on this problem in particular? Because I feel like many people's first company they really focus just on the product and the technology and then on your second company you're often more likely to also focus on the customer side. The commerciality. Was that your story or were you always kind of more commercially focused in terms of how you thought about problems in the world to solve?
- [04:48]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, I mean one of my I guess theses is that there is a lot of untapped potential and just like really strong technical folks in making them a bit more commercial. Because the types of problems on the go to market side, they're I would say generally a little bit more hairy. And so a lot of folks don't like the messiness and especially a lot of technical folks enjoy the engineering product problems more. But they're still kind of very interesting problems, very rewarding and if you can do that well, that's how you get your company to grow a lot faster because you just do more sales and at the end of the day it's still problem solving. So yeah, I mean I'll. Joshua and I were both technical backgrounds. We just got along very well. He's similar stages in life. We both started a company before as you said, and the first time is when you kind of lack a little bit of the commercial sense and you're just generally just trying to figure things out. It's very hard to build intuition of what is a good idea and what isn't. And so it is definitely easier the second time around.
- [05:41]
Host
How do you think about how you hired or what sort of people you looked for for the team the first time around versus this time? Like what are you optimizing for in the people that you bring on board in your second company?
- [05:52]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, I mean we're a little fortunate now. I think we've built a bit of a brand around our talents and I think we have like a fairly interesting culture now. The way I would describe it is yeah, we're generally just selecting for very smart people. First of all, I think we care more about that than like direct experience and so on. I think early on experience is still quite important. I don't think we hired straight out of college for our first pretty large number of hires. But of course now we are. So you want a little bit of that blend. But the first thing we select for is just how smart you are. And that's worked out well for us. We apply that philosophy basically across the org. I think obviously engineering is very generally easy to test for, but even on sales and marketing, so that's been a core part of our philosophy. The other piece is just we're in office, there's a lot of, I guess like fun news now. Companies work really hard.
- [06:48]
Host
Yeah, yeah, sure.
- [06:49]
Jesse Zhang
It's like the 996 culture and so on. I mean, I don't think we, we like over rotate on, on stuff like that. I think we just, we're just looking for people where you can tell when you meet them that they really see this as like ideally like, like a, like a. They want it to be like a highlight of their career basically. They want to put in the time and they want to be in a position where if they put in the time, they'll get stuff out of it and they get to, you know, accelerate their career. They get to work on very, very interesting problems.
- [07:14]
Host
So are you in office every day, like five days a week in terms of when people are supposed to be in or.
- [07:19]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, we're five days and then a lot of folks come in on the weekends. But it's not like a requirement.
- [07:25]
Host
Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. I mean it definitely feels like you have sort of this hard working culture. People want to put in the time because, you know, it's interesting because if you look at professional athletes in training, they're always like, yeah, I train six, seven days a week, I work hard at my craft. And there was almost this period in Silicon Valley where people didn't want to say that. And I feel like with this wave of AI, suddenly it's come back that it's good to do that. That's how you build a winning company in a winning culture. So it seems like you all have kind of adopted that as how you approach things as well.
- [07:53]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, I think pretty much all the AI companies that are doing well have pretty heavy in office cultures. It's just you get way more done, especially in the early stage. I think after a certain point of scale. Yeah, you could definitely make the argument that it matters less, but as of right now, it matters a lot.
- [08:09]
Host
Yeah, it also seems like there's certain roles that always have been remote like throughout all of history, you know, in terms of certain sales roles or the like. Well then really you're supposed to be at the customer side as your office. Right. If you're doing some form of like field sales or the like. So it seems like a lot of people have sort of gone back to the pre Covid era for the startups that seem to be working best, which I think is really interesting. And you know, obviously things are working really well for you all.
- [08:31]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, exactly.
- [08:32]
Host
How are you thinking about the main types of roles that you want to build out in the company now or things you're hiring for or looking for?
- [08:39]
Jesse Zhang
Right now we're kind of mostly building for scale. So what that means is of course we need to hire a lot more ICs. We're bringing in more kind of like leaders and adding a bit more structure. Interesting thing we're thinking about now is like a people function. Never really needed that. But we're approaching 200 people. You definitely need folks to be thinking about that full time. And it's more around like org design and what is the right way to structure our operating cadence between the teams. We have an office now in New York. We're going to be spinning one up in Europe. There's a lot more of those problems now. And so that's definitely something we're thinking about.
- [09:14]
Host
I think that if you were to give founders advice around one thing that they should do that is against their instinct the first time they've scaled a company, what is that thing? Or how would you think about a big takeaway that you've had as you've gone from okay, we have this nimble team that's grinding on a new product into okay, we're scaling, things are working really well. We have product market fit and we have to move as fast as possible. Like, what's that? Is there a big mental transition that happens? Is there a specific tactic you'd suggest?
- [09:41]
Jesse Zhang
So I would say for us, we kind of hit our stride fairly early in this company. So it didn't feel like there was a before and after. I would say when we were building well, one, we stayed really close to the customer, which is always helpful. I think over time, the adjustment we are learning to make is thinking more like medium to long term versus short term. Because I think at the beginning you have to think short term. You're just optimizing for closing the deal or closing a couple customers. But once you have your legs under you, you both can think more long term. And also you have an obligation to because if you don't, then eventually you get to a point where things really start breaking and you feel like, oh man, I should have scaled this better and so on. So we're definitely in that journey right now and we're trying to be as mindful of it as possible. Yeah, maybe one related thing is that we do spend a good amount of time studying sort of later stage teams that have done this well and there's obviously orgs that we admire where we.
- [10:41]
Host
Who are some people you think have done it well.
- [10:43]
Jesse Zhang
I mean ramp comes to mind for sure. Databricks, if you're thinking about bit more, there's just like economies that have just always executed well.
- [10:51]
Host
I think Ali at Databricks is one of the most impressive CEOs just in terms of how he thinks about things and depth of reflection on different topics. It's really impressive.
- [11:00]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, he's actually, I would probably go far as to say he's my favorite CEO and he's been very kind to us with his time and that's another good example. Honestly. It's like very strong technical folks that have I think also done very well applying that to commercial problems and execution and that's definitely the DNA we want to build at Dexagon.
- [11:19]
Host
Do you screen for commerciality and the people who join and if so, how can you do that? So say you have an engineer, do you try to find people who are more commercial minded or you think that self selects the culture?
- [11:28]
Jesse Zhang
I don't think it's super important for every engineer in the company to be commercial minded for example. I think it's definitely very important for the founders and then maybe the folks immediately around the founders. That's why I think generally when I talk to engineers that want to join startups, for example, and let's say they eventually want to start their own company, which is a very common profile in my opinion. It's way more useful to join somewhere where they've already kind of got the commercials figured out and you can actually see it in action and build that intuition than to join something pre pmf. And I think that's a very common misconception because it's like, oh well, the smaller the team, the closer I am to learning how to be a founder. But if you join a pre PMF team and you never actually get to see the commercials in action, you're not really learning much. You're just kind of learning essentially what not to do. And unfortunately the reality is that most companies don't hit that point. Our sort of discussion we have with engineers these days is hey, it's very important for you to join if you want to start your own company eventually decon is like the golden age to do that because we have a lot of the basics figured out, but there's still so much that isn't figured out. And a lot of it is kind of very close to the commercials.
- [12:33]
Host
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I think a lot of the golden periods for many companies is between say 50 and 100 people, up to, you know, a thousand, maybe 2,000 of the thing keeps going in terms of growth because that's the era where I think you see the most change. Although you know, also going from 2000 to 15,000 at Google, which is roughly when I was there, was also sort of this magical period of change.
- [12:52]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah.
- [12:52]
Host
And so I guess it depends on the size of the market and the way the teams run and everything else. So. Yeah, yeah, I guess also it seems like you can learn a lot more from success and from failure. And it sounds like in the context of Decagon, it's a really great moment to join because, you know, things are working and so people can learn different areas. Are there areas in particular that you know, you'd really like to attract people? Like, is it international, is it somewhere else?
- [13:13]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, I mean the way I would think about that is like you're kind of, if you're a founder, you're like training your own like neural network. Right. And you need like positive examples and negative examples. For my first company, I mean I started right after college, basically the first two years was just negative examples. You're just failing. And that's helpful in some sense because you can just kind of brute force it and try to learn. But if you get some positive examples sprinkled in, your learning rate is just way faster. Yeah, I think that's the misconception. Yeah, I mean as we expand internationally, I mean that's important too. I think an interesting thing with each new office is that you also have to kind of rethink the. We worked really hard to build our current culture and SF Office New York, we're going to obviously send some folks out, but got to be mindful of that culture as well because once it's set, it's kind of like becomes its own living thing. Europe is a whole different thing because the culture over there is naturally a little bit different. And so you have to be a little bit mindful. It's also just also naturally more isolated.
- [14:08]
Host
You have to serve wine at lunch and all that kind of stuff. When you talk about having to shift the way that you think about things more towards medium and long term planning is that org design is that Internationalization, Is that product roadmaps? What is that? Is that capitalization? I'm sort of curious, what are the main components that you've had to start thinking longer term on?
- [14:29]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, it's probably say it's more org design and product roadmap. Org design in terms of how you allocate resources. Because there are a lot of types of work that don't yield immediate returns. It's not going to close a customer for you, but if you don't do it, you will in six months, one, really regret it and then two, you'll just be in a spot where it's much harder to do that work.
- [14:49]
Host
What's an example of that?
- [14:50]
Jesse Zhang
Just like core product work, right? There's a bunch of core product work that is important for closing customers in the future. It's not going to close any customers now. We'll probably still be fine for now, but you can definitely foresee that. Okay, well if you don't invest in this, then closing each incremental customer in the future will require the same level of work, if not more, because then you just have more overhead and you want that to go down over time. And so that's the classic type of thing where you have to shift your mindset a bit. Because I think in the early days it's really good to have a greedy mindset. It's like, okay, I just really need to optimize for this one thing. Just get it over the line instead of just planning too long term. Because if you do that, you could just end up burning a quarter and not getting anywhere. And so I think over time you have to make that switch.
- [15:38]
Host
Did you set off to do customer service when you started Echagon, or is that something that you all discovered early on as you were iterating on ideas or things like that?
- [15:45]
Jesse Zhang
Oh no, definitely did not come in with any preconceived notion. I had a lot of empathy for the problem just from my first company. It was a consumer company, so we had a lot of users. But our general approach, kind of going back to the commercial side was I think we're just a lot better at being commercial about this in the early days. And so we just talked to a lot of customers and had a very disciplined process of evaluating ideas. And yeah, it turns out that this has been one of the big use cases.
- [16:15]
Host
What made you realize that this was the thing to do?
- [16:17]
Jesse Zhang
The real answer is we just saw a lot of folks that were willing to pay us like, you know, six figure contracts, which at the time when you're at 0arr, it's like, oh, wow, that's huge. And a lot of folks that were willing to, you know, do the same thing and it was the only idea we really explored that really had that property where people were like, hey, yeah, like if you did this, I would literally pay you money, because I can justify it. The sort of flip side of that at the time was more just, oh, well, this is such an obvious idea. Like, why do this? Because people would have thought of this stuff before, but that's a whole nother thing. I think once you start doing anything, once you get into it, you understand there's way more nuance than the overall narratives. The sheer fact that people are willing to talk to us like two people and willing to pay us money was signal enough that it was worth doing.
- [16:58]
Host
I guess when I look at sort of the history of technology, anytime there's a big platform shift, the providers of the platform start to forward to integrate into the biggest applications on the platform. So an example of that would be after Microsoft launched its os, it forward integrated in what became Office. Right? Those were four separate companies doing PowerPoint and Excel and all this stuff. And then eventually they just subsumed the functionality of those things and cross sold it as a bundle. And then that happened later with Google where they started adding vertical searches for the biggest categories of search. If you think of that in the context of the foundation model providers like OpenAI or Anthropic. Anthropic is already providing cloud code. They're already kind of forward integrating in different verticals. They mentioned financials is another area that they're moving into. OpenAI famously tried to buy Windsurf and sort of enter coding more directly. Do you think about that at all in the context of what you're doing, given just the size of the market and the velocity at which you're getting adoption?
- [17:52]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense for the labs. I think OpenAI, for example, most of their revenue and most of their margin for sure is coming from ChatGPT and the application layer. Because you actually own the customer you get, you're kind of indexing more on the problem you're solving rather than the costs of your model API business, for example, they're probably not expecting even to make that much money from that long term and they probably see it more as a wedge.
- [18:18]
Host
Some of those work out well, right? In other words, one could argue AWS and the cloud providers are good examples of what was perceived as a lower margin business that has Enormous scale and can throw off a ton of cash. And so these API driven businesses strike me as something similar. I'm just more curious how do you think about defensibility relative to these things? And you know.
- [18:37]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, so I guess the point I'm trying to make is I think it makes a lot of sense for them to push into application layer and I think they will. In terms of what applications. I mean generally they'll probably start with applications where it's more consumer prosumer y because there's, it's just more self contained, it's like easier to build the software on top. Long term they may move into more enterprise y things. I don't think it's like super useful for applications like us to spend a ton of time thinking about what the AI labs will do. I do think the more enterprise you are, the thicker the layer of software is. It's not even stuff related to the models. It's like okay, how do you have observability and monitoring on all the conversations? How do you learn from the conversations? How do you really dissect the insights? How do you build a testing simulation suite for QA of the conversations? And there's just so much to build. That's what we're focused on right now I think. Yeah, might make sense. And yeah, who knows, maybe one day we'll collaborate with the labs. We already have great relationships with the larger ones but I think before they tackle our space there will probably be other spaces they have to tackle first. Coding is probably one of them I guess.
- [19:40]
Host
On a related note, how do you think about differentiation? What do you do uniquely or how do you think that you'll build them out over time?
- [19:45]
Jesse Zhang
When we first started the company, this idea is very easy to grok.
- [19:49]
Host
Right.
- [19:49]
Jesse Zhang
There's a lot of big platforms out there too like Salesforce with agentforce and Google, some of the more AI native players. What's worked for us so far is a couple things I think. One, we kind of have a unique, we just have a relatively young, intense team and that has lend itself to a couple things. I think the biggest one is just speed. So we just able to move really fast and that shows itself in building the product and executing on the go to market side and specifically in the products. I would say we've kind of differentiated ourselves into taking this approach of like hey, this should be a very productized space. You should have an AI agent that's really easy for non technical people to work with and for them to build the agent iterate on it Analyze it. And that's in pretty stark contrast to how the industry has always worked. If you think about, you know, the salesforce of the world and just the classic SaaS, it is a very more like a technical endeavor. You have to bring someone in to do the configuration, you have to have technical resources and as you scale you can build something quite powerful. But it just becomes very slow and expensive to maintain because engineers to go through everything and at the enterprise there's so much complexity and nuance that you have to resolve that. So I think our view so far has been kind of different in that one of the things that LLMs unlock is that you can really empower the non technical business users and that has, I would say, been pretty well received. Different teams have different strategies, of course, but for the folks that we're working with, and especially as you go more up market, I think people really like that strategy. There are definitely some teams out there that are more engineering driven which like if the engineering team owns the entire customer service deployments, then maybe our current approach doesn't make as much sense. But I would say what we found is even when the engineering teams are very much involved, they don't necessarily want to be on the hook for every little change. And so in that case we can work very well with them. And you have them still owning. How does the AI agent interact with the systems and connect APIs and so on where. And then we allow them to offload sort of the logic building to the business users. So that's probably what's made us different so far. Again, obviously we respect the sales forces of the world, build amazing businesses, but we just don't think that's the right approach for the AI era. And then on our end, yeah, I think we really want to differentiate on execution.
- [22:06]
Host
If you look at the big shift that's happening right now in AI because of the capability set, we're basically moving from software as a service to basically some form of labor or cognition as a service. Right. And so you see that sometimes in the pricing models where people instead of charging per seat will maybe have some baseline platform fee, but then they'll charge on utilization or other things because fundamentally it's almost like you're helping augment an agent versus just having a piece of software that they're living in or using. And I think that's a very big shift. How do you think about the long term version of that relative to your business or what do you see sort of coming on the horizon?
- [22:39]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, I think those pricing models are Pretty use case specific. So if you're using a coding agent, for example, I think charging based on almost like the GPU usage or something like the number of cores you use could be interesting for us. It's actually quite different because you have a very tangible output that you can measure the agent by, which is the conversation it's having. And when you talk to customers, that's generally how they think about it too. It's like, hey, we have a cost per contact or a cost per conversation. And so when you deploy an AI agent, it makes sense to use the same pricing instead of pricing a flat per seats, because they're not really a seats concept here. You also don't want to price per minute of the call either. That's just kind of weird. And also incentivizes the agent to just have really long calls. So you price basically the number of conversations that it can have. It can be any conversation or it can be a conversation that doesn't require a human. So maybe that makes it apples to apples. And then our customers generally come in and buy a sort of allotment of conversations for the term and then they burn down. And we'll probably start seeing that more and more in the AI agent space where you, you generally price per, like the output that it's doing. I think that that works. I think that's just very clearly the right pricing model for our space and makes sense to buyers and makes sense to us as well.
- [23:53]
Host
Yeah. It also really changes how you think about the total addressable markets for some of these things. Because if you're charging per se, you're, you're really limited by the number of people working at the company. If you're charging per conversation or per some aspect of code written or other things. And really the market equivalent is sort of the people working in that sector. Right. It's not actually the seats for the company. So, you know, you're talking about their salaries versus seats. And so that's a pretty big shift in terms of how to think about tam.
- [24:21]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah. It's also just kind of like now the entire services TAM or services revenue is now part of the market because you're kind of shifting that into software. And that's why when we kind of think about ourselves as well, like even us, plus like all of our competitors, plus like everyone working on like generative AI agents is probably still like a grain of sand in the overall market right now. And that's, that's exciting because there's a lot to do.
- [24:47]
Host
How do you think about this? Relative to the overall customer journey. So particularly for certain types of consumer companies, there's customer service. But customer service almost starts when somebody just shows up to the website for the first time to purchase something, right? There's almost this whole like, yeah, how does that impact what you build or how you work with your customers?
- [25:03]
Jesse Zhang
That's why we use the term concierge and that's how we think about it. And it's kind of interesting actually, when we first started the company, because of course we're engineers and we haven't worked in contact centers ourselves, we kind of assumed that that's how most customers would view it as well. It's like, hey, well, you're building the system that can have any conversation. It turns out that in most customers, all the different types of conversations are just owned by completely different teams, completely different budgets. So if the reservations team at a hotel is probably going to be different than the customer service team overall, though, eventually you want this to be a unified concierge experience. And that's what a lot of leaders are excited by, is like, can you have just something intelligent that is just there for the end user? It becomes like the go to way that they interact. And eventually if it's good enough, most consumers will just interact with the agent instead of you've been logging into the mobile app or the website. So on.
- [25:53]
Host
How do you define success for your company in the long run? So it's five years from now, 10 years, you're looking back, what would make you feel like you've accomplished what you set out to do?
- [26:02]
Jesse Zhang
Well, on one hand, there is like a specific goal for our company, right? We want to grow, we want to grow the scale of the business and we want to be the winner in this exciting market. So how's that defined? I mean, in five years we want to of course be working with largest companies and have just like all the, just powering sort of these conversations for all the major brands out there and essentially just reinvent the way that most consumers interact with products and have conversations. And the other metric is, yeah, we like to get there through just having a very sharp product and just go to market execution in the same way that I'm currently talking about the databricks and the ramps of the world. We want to build a business like that where we're just doing everything super sharp and very thoughtfully.
- [26:49]
Host
I remember reading once that somebody asked Larry Page in the early days of Google what he was hoping to accomplish. And he said, I want to have a billion dollar company and the person Replied with oh, you mean a billion dollar market cap? He said no, a billion dollars of revenue. At the time that was like this insane goal. And it was like mind blown. He's so ambitious. And then you look in hindsight and I don't know if that's like the revenue they do in a day or I don't know, it's some crazy overshoot on outcome. So I think that's a very tough question, but I was sort of curious how you thought about it.
- [27:19]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, it's tough at this point. I mean we have what the databricks are like single digits, billions of revenue and they will probably say that they're still very early on. Right. So yeah, we don't think about things that far ahead. I just don't think that's useful. Obviously we're extremely ambitious and so we want to build a company of that scale or more. But it's also one step at a time.
- [27:42]
Host
As we talk about thinking ahead on longer timeframes, 5 years, 10 years, whatever it may be, one could imagine that eventually customer support and customer service really becomes very agentic. And at the same time people probably have agents going and buying things for them or interacting on their behalf. How do you think about that future? When do you think that is? Are there any non obvious things we should think about for that or how should we think about that future world or potential future world?
- [28:04]
Jesse Zhang
Oh, I think that world is basically here. I mean you have all these consumer agents that are going out there and they can order doordash for you and so on and at some point maybe they'll call into an airline to reschedule your flight or something and then maybe they'll talk to our agent and then you'll have agents talking to each other. I think in the near term they'll still communicate natural language just because each agent also needs to be compatible with humans. Right. So if they talk to a human agent, a human support agent, or if we talk to a human customer, of course it has to be compatible. But as they become more prevalent, you'll probably end up with slightly more efficient ways of communicating. And I think that'll be interesting. We just have two agents interacting and they're just like spitting tokens at each other and you can just get something done. But I think ultimately it'll still be rooted in natural language because I don't think anytime soon we'll be in a world where 100% of interactions are done by that. So each agent still has to be compatible with natural language. Yeah, that's something we'll have to think about soon. It's not something we're seeing at scale now where you have agents writing in for you. I mean, part of the vision we talked about before. Right. Is that right now a lot of the conversations are more reactive support. It's like, hey, I have an issue. Can you fix it? But over time, it'll be more and more broader. Right. In terms of, like, being able to do purchasing decisions, being able to upsell folks, being able to be proactive and reach out when you detect an issue. And these types of conversations, I think, make a lot more sense for having these personal agents in there, like someone doing your shopping for you and just goes and buys it. And they can talk to their agent to actually get it done. And the personal agent knows that their personal preferences, they know what to give in on if there's this thing's out of stock and maybe go for a different choice. Yeah, it's kind of weird to think about that. It's just all these interactions happening outside of humans and still stuff's getting done. But I think I'll be here sooner than later.
- [29:54]
Host
It's really interesting. It's almost like every person has a personal assistant, a personal shopper or whatever it may be. I remember one person I used to work with a lot. His view was that a lot of technology is basically looking at what the richest people in a society are doing and then saying that'll be available for everyone. And so if you go back to Roman times, you had these open sort of room and baths, but if you were very wealthy, you'd have like a bath in your own home. And obviously we all have baths right at home. And I think we almost forget that that's like a technology innovation and evolution. And so it seems like a similar thing. If you look at Bill Gates or whoever, he probably has a staff of people who buy clothes for him and go and do things for him and book flights for him. And so therefore, everybody will have this at some point, it'll just be agents. It sounds like interacting with each other.
- [30:37]
Jesse Zhang
Yeah, I doubt they're booking flights, but yeah, no, I agree. Yeah, I. I think that is. I mean, that's an interesting framework. It makes you think, like, what are the other things that folks are doing? But yeah, at least in our context, we definitely expect more of these sort of AI assistants to be part of the ecosystem. Amazing.
- [30:59]
Host
Yeah. Well, thanks so much for joining me today.
- [31:00]
Jesse Zhang
Thanks for having me.
- [31:04]
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