← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
Onfire CEO Tal Peretz on AI that actually drives revenue
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Monday.com AI Agent
Monday, AI agents took over my work
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Tal Peretz
and I absolutely love it.
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Monday.com AI Agent
Chasing deadlines, writing status reports, updating stakeholders. Agents handle the daily grind. Now they live inside Monday.com, so they see the full my work, my team, the whole company. And I don't have to worry about the data. It's safe. Which means I'm free to focus on the big stuff, knowing everything runs smoothly in the background. It's completely shifted the way we work. Create your own AI agent in minutes on Monday.com
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Tal Peretz
Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word.
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Carvana Narrator
My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana. Twas a lovely suv, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it. Tonight we feast. An offer you can feast on. Sell your car today on Carvana.
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Tal Peretz
Pickup fees may apply.
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Greg Kilstrom
Hi, I'm Greg Kilstrom, host of the Agile Brand, and here's a question for you. In the push to integrate AI into go to market strategies, are we optimizing for activity or for intelligence? Agility requires not just adopting new technologies, but critically evaluating how they deliver contextual intelligence. It's about adapting your strategy based on smarter signals, not just automating existing processes at a higher volume. Today we're going to talk about moving beyond the hype of generic AI in sales and marketing to focus on what actually drives revenue. We're going to explore the concept of vertical AI specifically for go to market teams selling to technical audiences and how decoding intense signals from public developer conversations can create a significant competitive advantage. Welcome to season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. Again, I'm your host Greg Kilstrom and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor, TechSystems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world adoption. For more information, go to techsystems.com now let's dive in to help me discuss this topic. I'd like to welcome Tal Peretz, CEO and co Founder at Onfire. Tal, welcome to the show.
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Tal Peretz
Thank you so much, Greg. Thank you for having me. Such a pleasure.
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Interviewer
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this. Definitely a timely topic here. So let's before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Onfire?
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Tal Peretz
Yeah, for sure. So I'm tal, I'm the co founder and CEO of OnFire. I've been dealing with, I want to say AI even before it was a trend for the last decade building sophisticated data models in few areas. Previous to my role on fire, I've been on the other side as a cto, leading engineering and product teams. So I understand what is to be on the buyer side and now moving into the seller state and on fhir.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, great, great.
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Interviewer
Well, yeah, let's dive in here. And I want to start with, I teed up the term vertical AI in the intro and I want to maybe start there. And so you draw a distinction between generic, more horizontal AI and a vertical approach for go to market teams. First maybe define what do we mean by vertical approach and then how do you see why vertical? What kind of falls apart with a horizontal approach?
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Tal Peretz
Definitely. So just for the audience to be on the same page. So when we say vertical, it means that we specialize in specific category, specific industry. In our case, we started with helping companies that sell to technical buyers. So as you can imagine, those sellers that sell to the CTO, CISOs, CIOs probably one of the toughest buyers out there. Those technical people, they have their own places when they try to learn and take decision on tools like places like credit, slack, discord, et cetera. And when we started the company, we understood that something has shifted. If we're talking about AI, everyone knows what it is. Everyone understand how they can leverage that. But what we had in mind as a team is basically AI right now make it even harder for marketing and sales team to drive their, let's say, mission and bring more pipeline. Because everyone can right now do what we call massive personalization or scale marketing with AI. And right now the bar became hi. So the only approach that we believe in right now is that if you will go vertical and have the right data and context, this is where the true power will bring from the AI solution right now. So this is the reason why we started verticalized. And we can jump into it in more depth if you would like. But that's the high level.
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Carvana Narrator
So.
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Interviewer
Yeah, and as you mentioned, you know, the idea of monitoring public channels like Reddit, Stack overflow, others isn't new. You know, that's, that's been done. But applying a vertical AI layer is something that's, that's new. So, you know, maybe talk a little bit more about, you know, what, what Strategic advantage. Does this data layer first approach give a revenue org over one relying on its own first party data?
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Tal Peretz
So I think the easiest way to describe it is with first party data you only know what you know. You have your own calls, you have your own communications with the customer and what it told you in the last meeting. But as we all understand sales, the interesting stuff happen where you're not in the room where they are talking about different competitors, they're looking into some success plan that they have internally that maybe they bringing in another, you know, part of the buying committee that you wasn't even aware of. So we had this approach and understanding from the early beginning is that go to market is probably the, the place where first party is maybe 1 to 2% of the actual intelligence that's happening on the public. So we, we build it their solution and on fhir from a data first approach to make sure those companies understand what is happening in the public web right now and what is happening inside of customers without being inside a room.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, yeah.
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Tal Peretz
And we take this approach into the vertical AI solution as we described. So they have the best context both from the third party and the first party. And this is why, you know, we see our customers and birds that we are working with, they have a much better understanding what is happening and their marketing activities become much more relevant with less of a headcount than a budget but with much higher return of investment. So I think this is the holy grail right now with what is happening with AI and we're trying to do it.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah.
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Interviewer
So let's dive a little deeper then into the mechanics of this. There's lots of conversations on these platforms as anyone who's ever been to one knows. How do you differentiate between a developer asking a casual question and one that is signaling genuine buying intent?
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Tal Peretz
Yeah, so that, that's the, I think like the, one of the most complex problems right now and maybe let's break it down to the audience to few parts. The first part is to understand first of all that where those conversations are happening. So we have been investing a lot of finding those open communities on specific platforms. Some of them are not even indexed on the public web and we need to drill down manually to find them. So that's number one.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah.
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Tal Peretz
Once we have that, we basically monitor all of the different messages that's posted on those specific platforms and then we have a layer of what we call like customer classification that are on AI models that of course build on top, you know, the public LLMs like Anthropic and OpenAI, but also with proprietary data from Onfire, we able to describe if the message is something that showing any buying intent, like evaluation of tools, asking for recommendations, asking about pricing or any experience versus someone that maybe, you know, talking about something generic like how is the weather today?
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, yeah.
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Tal Peretz
So once we classify that and we have the message that the last pillar of that is the ability to understand who is the prospect behind the message. Because as we all know those platforms, let's take credit, for example, you don't use your real name, so they're like anonymized members. And this is where the true technologies kick in. Because what we are trying to do here is to find out if there are any public footprint that the users basically left on those PAL communities. And then based on that, the ability to find out and do the entity resolution of who is the actual individual right now. Yeah, yeah. So when you have those three layers and you add on top of that the context of the customer. Because one customer that sells, for example, in our end, the cloud security solution, it's not the same from a company that sells something for the developers then. So they care about different contacts, they care about different size of customers, they care about different, I want to say, conversations. So when you integrated all of that in the context of the customer, this is where the true power reveals.
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Interviewer
Yeah, well, and then comes that handoff. Right. So it's like what do you, you've, you've done all of that, which is, you know, there's, as you described, there's a lot going on there to identify that, that buyer. What does the handoff look like then to the, you know, to the sales development rep, account exec, whoever.
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Greg Kilstrom
In practice, yes.
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Tal Peretz
So today, and I can give like a practical example that we see from a public cybersecurity company.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah.
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Tal Peretz
And the way they act on the data is I think like one of the most impressive, you know, workflows that I've seen. So they have this like, I want to say strategy where they call like data first. So any data that they use like on fhir always need to sit in inside their data lake. In their case, it's Snowflake that is connected to the data from Salesforce, the data from their call recording system. And you have one place that holds up the entire data and context of your customers. And then whenever you go out and looking into Salesforce, you will see the data. If you ask questions on the specific solutions, you will see the data. But then what they've done, they basically hooked it up into cloud coworkers and then the account executives are able to prompt and ask questions through on fhir with cloud.
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Interviewer
Nice.
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Tal Peretz
So they have the power of the agent plus the right data in context so they can build dedicated workflows, dedicated questions that are super personalized for their needs right now. So I think this is like the cutting edge of what is happening right now in go to market and I'm assuming that more and more organization will go that path.
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Greg Kilstrom
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Interviewer
Let's talk a little bit about measurement then. Obviously closed deals and stuff like that are going to be the ultimate KPI. But what leading indicators or other metrics tells an organization that they're on the right path with an approach like this?
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Tal Peretz
Yeah, so first of all, this is probably one of the things that I like the most about the category of go to market because everything is measurable. Yeah, you touched the last mile around the actual clause one revenue and the expansions. But usually the leading indicators that we see is for example, how many new prospects I discovered in general that are relevant to my specific strategy. That's one second how many got engaged and then we see meetings that got booked, opportunities being created and we have the entire funnel and you can see pretty fast the comparison between the before use on FHIR and the after. So we basically trying to uplift each of those metrics up across time and to learn again and again and make the model better based on the customer context. Because once we understand that something happened with one of our data points and the model understand that, okay, this is something that I get positive ROI out of. So the next time it will try to fit in more of those type of examples. So this is how we structure that with our customers today.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah.
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Interviewer
And so you know, what's the impact then on the sales team itself? You know, I would imagine is this replacing work that they were doing in other ways? Is this, you know, adding a new dimension? You know, what, what, what does this look like for a day to day of a sales team? Really?
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Tal Peretz
Yeah, that's a great question. I can tell you that our standpoint on this is we want to empower the existing workforce and we believe that today Those sellers basically 80% of their time is doing what we call like manual work or busy work. You know, prioritize the relevant accounts, do the research on them, have the prospecting flow, a lot of things that AI really excellence at. And we want to take out this time from the seller so it can be focused on more revenue generating activities, be customer facing, the ability to close more deals and be present. And usually where we look into the metrics, we have what you call a high level metric or top line metric around what is the revenue per rep. And we want to see that, we uplift that so the team can do more with the same headcount because of on fire, because of AI.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, yeah.
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Interviewer
And so then looking ahead, I mean, is this approach the way that B2B go to market teams are going to do things in a couple of years, is this going to remain very specialized? What do you see here
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Tal Peretz
in the pace of how things are moving in the AI era? I think I really don't know that's the true answer. Yeah, no, but what I can tell you is that right now the way I see it is that if your marketing division or sales division won't embarrass any AI solution that will understand their data in a deep and contextual way. So I'm assuming your competitors will win against you fast.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah.
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Tal Peretz
Because they will use Something like this and they will empower their, their reps and it's not just about on fire. There is great tools out there.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah.
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Tal Peretz
And I think this is like the, the true generational changes that we are right, right now seeing in the market.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, yeah.
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Interviewer
And you know, so for those, for those out there listening, regardless of the tooling specifically, what's your recommendation for marketing and sales leaders to think more from a contextual intelligence standpoint? What's the first step to get them started down that path?
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Tal Peretz
Yeah, that's a great question. I think and this is a few examples that I saw that works pretty good for modern customers in space is first of all, you need someone inside the go to market organization to own can be under revenue operation or marketing operation, but someone that on a daily basis think about AI, think about optimizations, understand the new tools and is kind of like out of the usual workflows, usual days and you have some time to think about it from, from first principles. So once you have this specific hire and then you equip them with the right strategy around where my data is going to land. Because AI will be as good as your data. Everyone use the same models. We want to make sure that we fit them in with the right data to be in much more context. So you need to take this part in place. And the last I want to say part is decide which workflows you want to start with. I saw personally a lot of revenue leaders that saying, okay, everything is going to be AI native right now and then suddenly nothing is because you need to prioritize and you need to understand and you need to build enablement and you need to build maybe some technical solutions to support that. So I think the best teams, they start small with this like I want to say dedicated teams that build in inside the organization, they show the value, they show the roi, the sell it internally and then you start taking workflow after workflow and build, you know, this specific strategy till you take those 80% off.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, yeah, love it.
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Interviewer
Well Tal, thanks so much for joining today. A couple last questions as we wrap up here. First one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
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Tal Peretz
I think that we were talking about more of our AI is going to change marketing and performance marketing. I think it's just in the beginning right now we are seeing a lot of changes on the sales and email marketing and those kinds of places. But I feel like the next big change is going to be in performance marketing and this is just the beginning around that.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Love it.
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Interviewer
Well, we'll have to have to talk about that in a year then. That sounds great. And last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it? Consider consistently.
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Tal Peretz
Yeah, so my I want to say hack is I listen a lot of podcasts like this and I'm trying to learn on a daily basis and to see what is like the cutting edge, making sure that I understand that I play with that. I put time on my calendar to try new stuff and new tools. Even as a CEO that run a lot of functions. I think this is the only way in this, what do you call it, AI native era to be relevant. So that's my tip for that.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, love it.
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Interviewer
Well again I'd like to thank Tal
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Greg Kilstrom
Paretz, CEO and Co Founder at Onfire,
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Interviewer
for joining the show. You can learn more about Tal and
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Greg Kilstrom
Onfire by following the links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full, full stack, tech services, talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@techsystems.com that's teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you liked the episode, hit subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach reach out. Just visit GregKilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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Grainger Narrator
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