The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Generative AI Transforming the Sales Process Featuring Brendan Short of Groundswell

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Brendan Short of Groundswell.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel, where we replay a snippet from the show we just recorded. Kostas, are you ready to give people a sneak peek? I am, of course. Let's do it. Let's do it. What a fascinating show with Brendan Short from Groundswell. Costas, I believe that's the first guest that we've had that's building a company that is sort of a bet wholly on generative AI. Is that right?

Am I remembering correctly? I think so. Yeah. Yeah. We've talked a lot about AI and ML workflows and ML ops, but it was really cool to have Brendan on there. He's a go-to-market guy, actually. So he's the founder and CEO

and has a long history on the sales side, believe it or not. I mean, I guess maybe we're making up for making fun of salespeople so many times on the show. But it was fascinating. I think there's two big takeaways for me because we covered a lot with brendan but two big takeaways one was certainly on the ai side where you know his vision for what he believes to be possible for his company using generative AI was really cool to hear about. It's easy to get caught up in the technical side of it. You and I talked about the ethics of it recently. The infrastructure side is really interesting, but he really believes that he can make things

drastically better for salespeople using generative AI, which is super interesting. But perhaps the even more interesting conversation was around the supremacy of Salesforce's data model. And that is really one of the topics I think that on the show has been, I thought about it every single day the week after the show, because you can say a lot of things that you want about Salesforce, but the lead contact account opportunity model rules the entire world. And we had a fascinating conversation about whether it's possible to dethrone the Salesforce data model that has become king. So it was fascinating. Definitely one of the more intellectually stimulating shows that we've had in terms of sort of broad market stuff in a while. Yeah, 100%. I think it's,

it is like a super interesting conversation that we're having, not only because of generative AI, which obviously like is a very fascinating topic and it's very interesting to see people trying to build in this space today, but also because Brandon has like a very interesting background. He's not a first-time entrepreneurial founder.

He has done this before. He has done it during the previous iteration of innovation that had to do with SaaS and cloud. And it's very interesting to hear all the commonalities between, let's say, the two eras in terms of innovation back then and now. What is similar? What is different? And there's a lot to learn, actually, from all the stories that he shared about Salesforce, about SaaS, how Salesforce became such a dominant product out there. And we also talked a little bit about what can happen to, what can potentially dethrone them, right?

How this can happen. What what can potentially dethrone them, right? How this can happen? What are the threats against Salesforce? So it's a very interesting show. It's all about data, again, but in some very surprising way. So I think everyone is going to find it like a very interesting episode to listen to. I agree. So do you think that Snowflake can become the new de facto?

Can they create the data model for CRM? We discussed that on the show. Maybe that's too far. That sounds like a Shop Talk episode. Yeah. Don't, uh, don't disclose it that disclose that much let's okay i won't disclose it no i just wanted to i just wanted to drop a juicy enticing nugget but yeah definitely listen to this one really fun to talk to uh someone from the go-to-market side who has studied data and is building a startup on generative AI and using intended data. So definitely take a listen, subscribe if you haven't, tell a friend, and we will catch you on the next one.