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Amos Bar Joseph
Foreign.
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Keith
Right, liftoff is so excited to welcome Amos Barr all the way from Israel to our podcast. I think it's fantastic he's staying up late for us today. Amos Bar Joseph is the is the co founder and CEO of Swan AI, a tech company exploring the ways modern businesses go to market in the era of AI.
Amos Bar Joseph
And as you know, I love a.
Keith
I love go to market. I love I'm a GTM junkie engineer and marketing passion around that. But, but Amos, welcome to the podcast.
Amos Bar Joseph
Thank you for having me, Keith. I'm excited. I appreciate that. Intro. Could I, could I take you with me to every social gathering and have you like introducing me to folks?
Keith
You can I. I do have to check off on where we're going and who we're meeting with first because I, I've made some enemies along the way too, but no, hey, speaking of famous though, come on. I just read in USA Today where you were named one of the business leaders to follow in 2026. I know your mom must be proud, right?
Amos Bar Joseph
Don't believe what they write in these newspapers, Keith.
Keith
Shoot. I used to, I used to fill up some of those, some of those headlines and some of those stories myself. But it's a beautiful headline. I think one of the things that that interests me is what's so exciting that you see in 2026 because I see a whole lot of things happening like never before kind of things happening. But where does your mind and your attention go?
Amos Bar Joseph
Yeah, I think that 2026 is the year that we're starting to see real validation around how the scaling model of a business is being transformed. Like we're used to this notion where scaling a business equals more headcount. And we were comfort with this notion that, you know, Apple has thousands and thousands of employees and Microsoft has even more and then Amazon has even more. And when you want to build a big company, you need a lot of people to support that vision. And I think what AI has done to that specific, specific mentality is that it turned it on its head and now more people could actually become bloat and can make you slower. And the reason why USA Today thought that it would be interesting to follow me is because we're building Swann as an autonomous business. Basically a business that is designed to scale with intelligence, not with headcount and is really optimized towards human AI collaboration really rather than human to human coordination, which is kind of like the old model.
Keith
You know, it's funny, it wasn't that long ago where companies used to be evaluated from a financial standpoint of how many engineers, developers they had and then that would impact the amount of money somebody would buy that company in a so called aqua hire. Now how do we look at that?
Amos Bar Joseph
Actually we have, we have a, a good sense when first of all we're trying to create these frameworks and methodologies around how to think about autonomous businesses and how to think about scaling in an AI native era. That's a lot of what we're obsessing about. And one of the key metrics is that right now what you should care about when you're building an autonomous business is just one thing. It's ARR per employee, revenue per employee. And instead of counting how many employees do you have, what you should be interested is understanding what, what's the revenue on each skull there basically. And the more that you can increase that metric, it means that the more leverage you're creating internally within your company. And it's a good proxy to think is that company utilizing AI? Well, if they're really using it well, it means that they're creating more leverage, there's more output that is being created per person in the company. And I think it's, it's kind of like changes the model on its head in a very profound way because we were used to this, the old model, we call it, you know, I love calling it cog culture where you know, each employee is just a cog in the wheel designed to scale the business. But ARR per employee changes that dynamic that the business is trying to scale its employees. It's different mentality, it's a different type of a scaling mindset.
Keith
And take me a, take me a level deeper than I know how to track it financially. My ARR. My revenue per employee. But how do I set my company up at that early stage? We got five or 10 salespeople, we're going out, we're driving leads, we're driving demos, we're trying to convert sales. Now we got sales going. How do I get on the right track, that, that this doesn't get bloat, bloated from the beginning or gets off course.
Amos Bar Joseph
Yeah. So what we did at Swan, that was different. We took it to the radical extreme. We, we, like me and my two co founders, we said, you know what, we have all the capability that is required to take a company from 0 to 1. Just within this team, I'm in charge of growth and strategy and business aspects of the business. And then we have a co founder who's super technical and can build the technical infrastructure. And then we have a co founder who could do product vision and understand how to guide the product in the right way. Growth, product, tech, basically what you need to build a software business at the early stage. And so we said, we are going to put a constraint. We're not hiring anyone to get to the point that we want to get to right now. And so the only way to solve a scaling challenge is not by throwing more bodies at the problem, is by actually turning into an AI native business. You try to solve problems with AI, not with hiring more folks. And that started a cascading event that is continuing until today that it became easier for us to solve scaling challenges with human AI collaboration workflows rather than just turning, okay, let's try to find a lot of people, fill in the positions and try to scale it with humans.
Keith
I wanted to ask about doing a little background on you, the phrase collaborative autonomy. So that's something you penned and you've spoken about that. How do we sort of embellish that for a company that's looking to really grow fast? A blitzscaling type of business.
Amos Bar Joseph
Yeah. I think the first wave of AI was all about replacing humans. We felt like, oh, AI is going to replace humans. And that's how you thought about it. Like, I have a human doing this job. How can I use AI to replace that work and then emerge all these startups that saying, you have support reps, I'll give you an AI support agent. You're having SDR sales development representatives, I'll give you an AI sdr. It's like that was the first wave of AI thinking and it collapsed. And that's why we actually see like more than 90% of AI implementations failing in the workspace. Now the second wave is coming and we're trying to pioneer that wave at Swan, which is basically, it's really about human AI collaboration. It's not about replacing, it's about reimagining how work gets done. When human AI collaboration sits at the core of how we think about processes and when we think about collaborative autonomy. And actually the term autonomous business is derived not from AI agents who were doing all their work on their own. It's about autonomy of employees and autonomous agents working together hand in hand. So a business that's trying to lean into the AI revolution is actually putting more emphasis on its employees and it's putting their employees at the hearth of the business and trying to give them more autonomy and support them with agents who actually could create more leverage for them.
Keith
So look, this fits into a whole lot of companies, you know, ideas in terms of how they're building their business.
Amos Bar Joseph
Right.
Keith
It's become the new standard model, at least where I live, which is the middle of Silicon Valley. But you know, maybe there too, but, but I feel like Your product, Swan, AI's product, the AI GTM engineer, right. Is very much focused on, on helping that for these companies. Tell me, give me a little detail of how that, how I start to use that, that platform to accomplish this. Give me a, give me a example or two if you can.
Amos Bar Joseph
Yeah, for sure. First of all, the surprising insight that we came to a realization with is that just like I said, it's not about replacing work, it's about reimagining work. If you look at an existing go to market organization today, it doesn't have any engineers in it. We're not replacing work. By providing the entire go to market organization with an AI go to market engineer in their pocket. What does it mean if you have a go to market engineer in your pocket? It means that it can remove all the technical complexity that stands between your ideas and their manifestation. And so if you want, do you have an idea that if someone lands on your website and requests a demo, if you would be able to, at the speed of thought, qualify them and then update the CRM and send them a personalized follow up, then you'll improve your conversion rate significantly. You have that idea, but now what stands between your idea and the implementation is a lot of technical complexity, basically. And maybe it's a ticket to revenue operations if you have it. If not, then maybe it's working with a consultant or maybe it's just trying to read HubSpot documentation or how do you do build inbound workflows with Salesforce and you just, you're blocked. And swann, basically what you could do with Swan is from prompt to pipeline, just tell Swan to build it for you and in seconds it builds that workflow for you. And now you have this experiment. If someone lands on your Website requests a demo. Swan sends you a personalized email and qualifies that act.
Keith
Does it act like an agent or an AI assistant, or is it part of a whole platform execution, almost like an LLM?
Amos Bar Joseph
Yeah, so it's more like. It's more similar to ChatGPT and how you work with it. Okay. It's basically ChatGPT for sellers in the sense that that's the only place they go to, they can ask Swan questions. Swan is integrated into all of their systems, so one can build anything they want at this instance. And basically it's just a chat interface that they could chat with. Although we do have other components, we don't think that AI native world is just chatting all the time. We have a dashboard. You can look at all the companies that Swan is working for you, you can understand and view the workflow that Swan built for you. So you do have visibility into the work that is being done.
Keith
Am I viewing this as the idea Generator, the Idea Partner, or the Idea Executor?
Amos Bar Joseph
Amazing question. I love that. So it's the latter, it's Executor. And the reason why is that the only successful AI implementations we've seen so far is where AI doesn't replace the idea generation, it doesn't replace the specification process of what to do. It can replace the execution process only when it knows exactly what to do. So what we're witnessing here, Keith, is the collapse of the middle. What does that mean? Is that until today, to get job done, you need to specify the work, you need to execute the work, and then you need to review the output of that work. And the collapse of the middle is that AI can take over the execution process right now. So if you're looking at Swan, if you want to engineer a workflow like that, Swan replaces the execution. You don't need to spend time on actually building stuff, but what you do need to spend time is on specification and review. You need to tell Swann what to build. If you don't, you're not able to just tell it what to build. You don't know your business enough to understand where are your challenges, where are your bottlenecks, and so you won't be able to specify how to solve your problems. You need to come up with that. And after you specify that, you need to have a well enough understanding of what's a good output. Well, how does good work look like? So you'll be able to review the output of Swan and if you have that ability to specify and review, then AI could collapse all that execution you can start scaling with intelligence, not headcount.
Keith
Okay, so now getting right down to it, what have you seen in like the last couple of examples that you could share with me of companies and what did they experience using this tool?
Amos Bar Joseph
Yeah, so I think that it depends on like your stage basically. If you're like super early stage, then you don't have a lot of like inbound motion coming to you. No one really knows about you. And it's really about like knocking on people's doors, trying to get their attention. Right. And so that's basically called outbound. Right. If you want to kind of frame it and they're like a specific process. And so Swan could help you identify all of your outbound initiatives. So instead of you trying to think who should I reach out to day and pick up a list and try to think about how do I personalize it or how do I need to research or if you're just putting everything into a dom, email automation sequences that are sending the same emails to everyone. You just talk to Swan and try to hypothesize that, you know what, let's try to reach out to folks who are just hiring for SDRs. For example. For us that could work well, you know, if you're hiring an sdr, you're trying to generate more pipelines. So let's reach out to folks who are hiring SDRs and let's reach out to the CRO and let's send them a personalized, you know, multi channel email LinkedIn campaign. Just talk to Swann, Swann builds that for you. Initiate that and you can say, you know what, if it's a super valuable lead right in my alley, I, I want to review the email for before you actually send it. So Swanna could just present it to you. You review the email, you said it good to go, it will send it. So you create like your human AI collaboration flow where you have the AI investing resources, where you want the AI to do maybe research, qualification, personalization and you're investing time where you want to invest time. So that's like early stage outbound. And the more the company matures, it starts to have these repeatable processes like you have like inbound flows coming and you want to have a great flow to get give this bit amazing buyer experience for these folks who are coming to your website. So you want to have the an AI that research and gives them personalized buyer journey and sends, you know, follow ups and schedule calls and assigns it to the right rep. Or you want to have an AI that is able to clean up your CRM and make sure that your CRM is really, you know, has good hygiene to it in terms of like the data integrity of it. And you start running account based signal motions. The possibilities are endless the more you scale. And Swan really doesn't have a limit to its capabilities in that sense.
Keith
Right. And it's going to get smarter. So the initial is cost savings and getting started on the right, down the right. The right path and then you start to see the ROI with better outbound lead generation tactics.
Amos Bar Joseph
Yeah. So I think, yeah, from that's from a value proposition perspective, definitely. But I love looking at it like that. At the early stage you don't know what's working and what's not and you just want to take that amount of time and resources that gets you to under to figure out what's working. Swann could just 100x that process. You land on the right go to market motion. Once you land on that motion, Swann could help you scale that with intelligence, not with headcount. So it's basically go to market as I see it, is a process of iteration. Get to something that work and then scaling it. So Swan expedites the iteration process and then enhances the scaling process.
Keith
Got it. So Amos, let me ask you then, what counsel do you share with? I, I'm sure you're like we joked, but you're somebody to watch, but you're also somebody who's listened to quite often, particularly in your market. What do you advise early stage companies as. As they are building their companies to focus on? Not, not from a commercial standpoint, but just overall, you're talking to founders.
Amos Bar Joseph
Yeah. So I think that, you know, if you look 20 years back, Silicon Valley for example, and the ethos that was built around it, these was. These were like super technical people who just had an amazing, you know, technical insight or like a product inside and they built something amazing. And then, you know, came that ethos of you got to have a CTO to build like an amazing software business. That was something that was really built into the foundations of the tech ethos. And then technology became a little bit commoditized and then building an amazing product was like the thing of the last decade by the way. Things like Slack Monday companies that just built an amazing product and scale with that. And that is also being commoditized with the fact that AI is just democratizing software engineering in such a fast space. And so what is the most important thing in 2026 and onwards in my Opinion is go to market innovation. And I feel like that is mostly overlooked by most of founders. They feel like innovation is something in the R and D and product department and that's where you should invest your innovation. And when it comes to go to market, that is something that you need to do to get that innovation to the market. But it's not really the case. And you, you know, today the companies that are succeeding are companies that have go to market innovation built into them. They cracked a method on how to get attention from buyers because that is what's becoming the most scarce resource out there. It's your buyer's attention. Because more and more businesses are coming up, it's easier to spin up new products, more people are fighting over attention and budget. What you should focus on, how do you innovate to rise above the noise? And so my perspective is it's not necessary to just have product innovation. You also need to go to market innovation. I love that.
Keith
Hey, so on the other side of the coin, what do you, what's that one thing you see startups do either in your network or out of your network. Then you go, you just cringe. You just go, why are they doing this? I know one of the things I hate seeing is people doing like paid search or something where they just come in out of the, out of the shoot, you know, and doing things that are sort of wasteful before they really have their ICP or they have their PMF locked in.
Amos Bar Joseph
Yeah. So I think the thing that I, I feel the most cringe for is cringe worthy people. The most cringeworthy thing is that when I see folks at the early stage asking me for example, like, are you familiar with the great lead generation agency? Like could you like where could I pay money to meet with people? Okay. Like just this idea of outsourcing, the process of finding prospects to meet with and is rational to them, you know, points at a flawed understanding of what's important when you're building your business. And it comes back to go to market innovation. Right. If you're not able to bring high quality leads there, there's a fundamental problem with how you're operating your business and you should obsess about how do we get qualified leads in a repeatable and scalable way. That is a core responsibility of building a company. You cannot outsource that. You cannot just pay someone to do that. What I do think that you can, you can hire a consultant, you can work with strategy, with strategists. You know, there are partners out there and consultants have so much experience, they could help you figure it out. They won't bring you leads falling from the sky that will help you build a sustainable motion. But you can't outsource completely completely that you can advise, you can get consult consultation, you can bring in on experts, but that is a core capability you're building in house.
Keith
Is that one of the things you focus on then Amos, is to get the companies to sort of build that GTM engineering into their product from the start.
Amos Bar Joseph
So I'm trying to create first of all the awareness that you need to look inwards to actually scale. The solution won't come from the outside in that sense. And as a vendor, it's pretty refreshing because vendors love saying, yeah, I have all the answers, you should buy my product to win and to grow. Right. But Swan is really designed to help folks just take their ideas and bring them to market faster. What we did is that to mitigate the fact that not all people know what to do and how to go to market, we are building a lot of best practices into Swann. And so we saw successful motion from posting on LinkedIn and converting folks who are engaging with our content. And so we told Swann how to do that and Swann knows how to do that. We know that you know how to run a great inbound motion. So we taught Swann how to do that and now Swann could teach its users to do that as well. So we're trying to bake in best practices into Swan. So it's not just a generic large language model that knows how to build stuff. It actually comes pre built with a lot of go to market best practices from a team that is obsessing over go to market innovation. And so you could enjoy some of that. Basically that Swan knows how to do inbound qualification, you know, signal based, outbound account based marketing, SEO, all of these capabilities. One already comes with a pre built know best practices on how to run and we hope that it will be able to not only perform the task better, but teach the users and how to do that better themselves.
Keith
What, where are you at right now as a business? Where are you in terms of customers or size of your business?
Amos Bar Joseph
Yeah, so you know, just with a three person team in 2025, we launched in January and over the last the last 12 months we grew to over 200 customers closing in on seven figures. ARR. So it's pretty easier.
Keith
Do you target a certain size company, a certain industry, a certain geography?
Amos Bar Joseph
Yeah. So our focus is, you know, small medium businesses. You know, if You're a startup, then it's like C to series B startups. If you're not a startup, then you basically already have some go to market motion running. But you're not huge, so you don't have like 50 or 100 reps already. So it's like somewhere in those lines, somewhere between that. We work mainly with US and European companies, but we have customers from Australia, India, you know, South Africa, all over the place.
Sponsor Announcer
Nice.
Keith
Well, this has been fantastic. Do you want to, you know, share anything else with the audience here? Amos? I've really learned a lot and really I think where you're going is exactly where the market is headed to.
Amos Bar Joseph
Appreciate that, Keith. Yeah. So if you want to, you know, follow me, I post on LinkedIn regularly so I share a lot of my knowledge there and playbooks and so join the ride and follow Amos bar Joseph on LinkedIn. I also have a newsletter, it's called the Big Shift. So if you want to get like a front row seat to how we're building the first autonomous business and get weekly updates about the wins and losses, you can subscribe. And finally, I have a digital clone. So if you had any questions in this conversation and you want to pick my brain, so it's not as good as my brain.
Keith
Oh, you're kidding. That is fantastic. It, it's, it's getting more common today but I think with somebody like yourself it will be particularly instrumental. You know how to build these things correctly and the information I'm sure is fantastic. Amos Swan AI is off to the races. I'll be anxious to watch it, attract it through your socials, etc. Thanks for joining the lift off today. We really enjoyed it.
Amos Bar Joseph
Thank you for having me, Keith, it was a pleasure.
Keith
All right, you take care and hey, sorry for keeping you up so late tonight but. But I love the energy too.
Amos Bar Joseph
No, it was a pleasure. I love the questions and I feel like, you know, for me it's always important when the other side is like in the conversation and engaging and not just like pre scripting everything. And so I loved how you were like engaged and curious and asked like the relevant questions. I feel like that's the audience can identify that.
Keith
I love this stuff. Thanks again. I will be following you and I know we'll be chatting again soon.
Amos Bar Joseph
Amazing. Keith, thank you so much. Bye bye, take care.
Date: February 10, 2026
Guest: Amos Bar-Joseph, Co-Founder & CEO of Swan AI
Host: Keith Newman
In this insightful episode, Keith Newman welcomes Amos Bar-Joseph, co-founder and CEO of Swan AI, for a deep dive on the radical shift taking place in how companies scale. Amos introduces the concept of the autonomous business and challenges the traditional view that growth equates to growing headcount. Together, they explore the emerging best practices for founders seeking to scale intelligently—by leveraging human-AI collaboration, boosting revenue per employee, and integrating go-to-market (GTM) innovation from day one.
On New GTM Metrics:
“ARR per employee changes that dynamic... The business is trying to scale its employees. It’s a different mentality, a different type of scaling mindset.” — Amos Bar-Joseph [03:36]
On The Collapse of the Middle:
“If you want to engineer a workflow like that, Swan replaces the execution. ...What you do need to spend time is on specification and review.” — Amos Bar-Joseph [11:41]
On AI’s Role:
“It’s about autonomy of employees and autonomous agents working together hand in hand.” — Amos Bar-Joseph [07:07]
On GTM Innovation:
“Today the companies that are succeeding are companies that have go to market innovation built into them. They cracked a method on how to get attention from buyers because that is what’s becoming the most scarce resource out there.” — Amos Bar-Joseph [16:59]
Keith on Avoiding Waste Early:
“I know one of the things I hate seeing is people doing like paid search or something where they just come in out of the, out of the shoot … before they really have their ICP or they have their PMF locked in.” — Keith Newman [18:50]
On Outsourcing Pitfalls:
“You can advise, you can get consultation, you can bring in experts, but that is a core capability you’re building in house.” — Amos Bar-Joseph [19:17]
Follow Amos: