Announcer (00:05.376)
Okay, everyone, here we go. This is PromptThis, the podcast designed just for you amazing business leaders who are ready to cut through all that AI hype and get straight to the real deal. Clint and Greg are here to help you navigate through the noise. They're bringing you insightful analysis and playbooks that will empower you to launch those brilliant new ideas and scale your business like never before.
You absolutely do not want to get left behind, right? So let's dive in. Now, here are your fantastic hosts. You're in for a treat.
Hi everyone, welcome to the podcast. I'm Greg. My co-host Clint and I started this podcast to explore how business leaders are using AI in the real world. We found that our friends and colleagues aren't just talking about AI, they're building with it. So we decided to bring them in one by one so they can share their stories with us. And that's Prompt This.
And I'm Clint. After spending a very long time at an AI customer relationship management software company that I founded and unsold, I figured it was time for something new. And generative AI is clearly where it's at. But where to start? So I teamed up with Greg to go interview... We could find on the topic and learn what's going on out there. Now I'm a podcaster interviewing smart business leaders to unpack how they've started using AI.
Everybody
Clint (01:34.904)
their companies.
Again, I'm Greg, and after years of running high performing sales teams that led with AI, I too am now a podcast co-host. I focus on helping sales and marketing leaders accelerate the use of today's AI to deliver record breaking results. Okay, what'd you think of this week's AI voice?
I don't know if I should say this, but this voice sounds a lot like Scarlett Johansson. And you know that whole story about how she went after OpenAI for using her voice without permission, right? Did you do that on purpose?
I just found it in Co-Pilot, but obviously we know what's on your mind.
Yeah, well, okay. I just don't want a cease and desist letter coming from her lawyers.
Greg (02:19.724)
Nah, nah, you don't have to worry about that. As far as you know. Yeah.
Hmm, okay, shifting gears. Let's chat a bit about today's guest. What's your take on the interview?
Looking back on the episode, I found it interesting to see the intersection of running human and cloud employees on the same sales team. Gabe really opened up about what it's like to have one on the team.
You know, I was really struck by how his company has literally flipped the script on AI and made their approach to agentic AI sounds so, so human. Cloud employees. Hmm. I'm still wrapping my head around that idea, but whatever you call them, I went to their website and took one for a spin. and you know what? They sure sound realistic and smart.
So be sure to stay with us until the end when we go to this week's AI challenge, where you get to do what Clint just did and interact with a cloud employee. So let's get into the episode.
Greg (03:27.342)
Welcome back to Prompt This. Today we're diving into the future of scaling your business with AI.
And we've got the perfect guide with us today, Gabe Larson, AI Growth Advisor at Signals, an AI company that helps businesses grow with AI power to cloud employees.
I think 24 seven AI agents handling lead generation, customer support, even recruiting, bring your team to focus on what matters. We're gonna unpack how that changes sales, marketing and customer engagement.
Hey, welcome to the podcast today, Gabe.
Yeah, hey guys, really appreciate it. Excited to jump in.
Greg (04:05.72)
So Gabe, you're at Signals now. Tell us a little bit about your role, how you landed there, and a bit about the company.
Yeah, yeah, well, I've only been with them a handful of months, but boy, we've been having a good time. We're joining the AI arms race. This is a fast one. Everybody's at it, and I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring. Wanted to join an AI company, wanted to get in with something that I thought was really cutting edge. And a friend of mine who is currently running this, Dave Elkington.
asked if I jump on board and so I did just, you know, maybe four months ago. So it's been a fun ride over the last four months, but at a high level, yeah, signals, as you said, we're helping companies discover the autonomous organization. A lot of people right now are trying to figure out how to grow, do more with less, and they're doing it through the traditional enterprise. What is that? It's that brute force. Hire a lot of people, add a lot of tools, cement old processes, and then rinse and repeat.
and works
I've lived that one a few times.
Gabe Larsen (05:11.982)
Yeah, I think we've all done that but we're seeing something emerge Microsoft has called it the frontier firm I've heard Benioff mentioned the agentic enterprise. I've referred to it as the Autonomous organization, but it's it's more about outcomes than than people it's more about teammates than tools and I think it's kind of the future of work as we get into this AI first go-to-market So I've been excited about it
Right on. So in there, am I hearing agentic AI? That's kind of a hot topic in the news right now. Am I on the right path when I kind of narrow in on that topic?
100%. 100%. I think people are referring to different AI situations differently. we have our own flavor on agentic AI. We think AI agents versus cloud employees are kind of different ideas and different philosophies. But at the core, yes, agentic is certainly what Signals is doing.
Well, I have to admit, I've been a little skeptical on the whole agentic AI topic out there. It like a lot of hype when I'm doing my reading or listening to other podcasts. Everybody gets their own personal C3PO or R2D2, and they're going to come in and just do everything for you. Is that real? Or what's actually happening with agentic AI right now?
Yeah, look, I think we're seeing a lot of hype and there is a lot of noise. And it's so hard to pop on LinkedIn and see that somebody created 10,000 appointments in a day and their business grew from zero to 100 billion overnight. And so I do think we're trying to cut through a lot of the noise. And I think there is an evolution that's going on right now. No, you're not seeing C3PO in businesses. I went to the dentist yesterday. There was still a receptionist at the desk.
Gabe Larsen (07:06.284)
Not a bunch of robots running the business, but I'd be lying Clint if I didn't say there's progress. Boy is AI, I think, starting to make some headwinds, but it is in certain areas and it is not complete replacement at this moment, but there is signals in this noise for sure.
You've been talking about this idea of the autonomous organization, right? And you introduced this idea of a cloud employee. What is a cloud employee?
Yeah, look, so again, in this kind futuristic organization, I don't think it's too futuristic now, but I think what you're going to see is AI teammates. You're going to see humans and cloud employees working more side by side as we kind of move to an organization that doesn't just scale on people, but again, scales more on output. For us, the core unit
in this autonomous enterprise is this idea of a cloud employee. It's the teammate, right? A cloud employee differs from an AI agent in a couple different ways. When we see AI agents in the market, they're very deterministic by nature. They're very simplistic. They're very task oriented, much more if this, then that, think N8N type little diagrams. Go scrape a website for me. Again, task oriented.
On the flip side, cloud employees are, just more complex by nature. They're more job oriented. They're omni-channel. They're working across multichannels. They're more complex by nature. They're autonomous, not deterministic. And so we do see it to be the next evolution in this AI journey.
Greg (08:52.302)
So I hear a lot about when you move into this step into your business, it's just as close to training a human employee. And I hear this everywhere, but since we have you, can you give me like just a quick example or two about, you know, once you've deployed it, you know, what is a training cycle? What does it look like?
Well, first, Greg, I have to say, you've got to be careful where cloud employees can fit in within your organization, right? And I think once you understand that, then I think the next thing is how do you actually insert them and get them going? And this goes back, I think, to Clint's point as well, where we're seeing the most disruption in AI, specifically with this concept of a cloud employee, something that's a little more autonomous, is really in a couple core areas, recruitment, sales development.
customer service, and then ultimately coding or engineering. Those are some of the highest volume roles in organizations. And we're seeing that a lot of AI is being focused at that and probably for the reason of being able to cut costs and get more efficient. And so those are some of the areas where we're really seeing these things kind of take on just a lot of credibility and a lot of difference. Now your question, Greg, was
Let's say you've identified one of those areas, how do you start to think about this? Is it really like a human or what does it mean or how does it work? Yeah, I mean, I think we're moving more towards that. Now these cloud employees can be, they learn very quickly. So if you remember that movie, that scene in The Matrix where Neo, he has that thing in his neck and they plug it in and they unplug it and he says, I know karate or I know taekwondo or whatever.
They do learn exceptionally well, so you can download data. You can push data into them extremely quickly. And in minutes, they know your whole website. They know your whole company. I had an author the other day put in his whole sales book and then grilled a cloud employee. And he was like, whoa, this guy knows everything about my 300 page book in five minutes. That's crazy. So you can definitely do that so the onboarding is quicker. So that happens fast.
Gabe Larsen (11:03.854)
But there are a couple things that I do. I actually have three cloud employees that report to me, and I do a weekly coaching session with them every week. What does that mean? Just like a regular BDR, for example, I ran a BDR team, I've run multiple BDR teams. I always like to review what they say, what they do, how they do it. I do the same thing. I go in and look at their call scripts. I listen to some of their calls. I see how they set up appointments. I see what the response was from some of the people they set up appointments with. And I go in and I...
give them feedback, I give them coaching and either talk to them or...
So you actually have a dialogue with this cloud employee as part of the coaching?
Yeah, we have it set up in two ways. You can do it via verbal or you can do it like a chat GBT type prompt structure. And you do, just say, Hey, I've listened to one of your phone calls. I did this just the other day. Um, I listened to one of your phone calls. The way you talked about one of our competitors, you said this, this, and this, I would probably kind of do it more like this, this, and that they never do it wrong again. That's the best part about it. You know, you need to speed up the way. That's one of the things I've been trying to find with caught employees is
speeding up some of the way they talk and getting some of the latency out of it. The nice thing is, again, unlike a human, the speed, it'll always be there. They don't go back to some of their core issues. But that is how we've been deploying some of these entities into organizations, Greg. Yeah. Just like you'd coach a person.
Greg (12:30.222)
That's amazing. Yeah. Now you recently woke up most of LinkedIn with a live session you did just a week or two ago around, what was it? 131 meetings or 134 meetings? In two weeks and you got all of our attention really fast. I'll tell you that much. But it really made sense the way you put it together and it got me thinking, you know,
101 we did 101
Greg (12:56.076)
You know, if you're, if you're bringing a cloud employee in, you know, you're running on KPIs where you're really measuring the performance of the team and the output and, and, know, baselining it for good weeks and bad weeks. What happens to the KPIs when you bring in an always on employee?
This is an interesting one. you know, there's a fundamental thing here. I'm to, I'm doing, I've done this twice now, but I want to answer one other question and then answer your question. There's just this idea of a teammate versus a tool, Greg. It's very, it's probably worth just taking a second in time to digest this because I think once you can kind of start to understand that, then the idea of how you get KPIs and how you work with these teammates makes so much more sense.
but there is a fundamental awakening. Maybe that's too bold, but a fundamental change that's happening as people, rev ops leaders, sales people start to say, hey, I don't need another tool. I want a teammate. And that mindset shift really starts to have you look at the world differently. And that's it. So many people I talk to, they're like, I want AI to help me listen to
get transcriptions from phone calls and I'm like, we already have that, that's called call, you know, that's just another tool. I think what you want is you want somebody, if I'm not mistaken, to talk to you before the call and do a little prep session and then during the call give you real-time feedback on one of your sales methodology about how well you're running through the different principles and processes and after the call you probably want to have a coaching session about how you did and feedback on the call. Isn't that what you'd rather have? Well...
Yeah. I think I would rather have that rather than just have a transcript go into some CRM that we never look at. this idea, Greg Clinton, people are starting to wake up to that idea of why have another tool that I have to hook up and then I have to do all this work to get to the outcome. Why not hire a teammate that just gets to the outcome by itself? And I think that's been one of the biggest challenges with SaaS fundamentally.
Gabe Larsen (15:08.778)
Software as a service never lived up to that promise. We got a tool, and then a person had to work with that tool to get the outcome. Now we're moving into this world of teammates where you literally hire something or somebody, and then that gets to the outcome itself. So I don't know. That idea has been something I've been debating and discussing a lot with people. But I wanted to throw that out, Greg, before I get to your KPI question. Any quick thoughts on that or questions? I didn't mean to divert too much.
No, no, I think you're definitely speaking about the nirvana that we've been talking about in the industry for years. mean, as sales leaders, we've been pressured for incredible scale growth and handcuffed by what you were discussing earlier about just bringing on additional resources and they just don't scale at what's been asked.
you know, at four results. So these are some of the things that we we've been, you know, if if this could happen, if this could finally happen and, know, you know, to to move a sales organization like that in the old days, we just couldn't we just couldn't even, you know, they brought on 500 more people. You couldn't get them executing it what you needed to to get these growth rates. So this is completely different.
What is-
Gabe Larsen (16:34.222)
Well, and I think it is the future of scaling. And look, the tool that we've had some great tools, but what if they led too often? They've led to don't give me some efficiency gains. Think about the SDR world. We've been able to send, know, when I was running my teams back in 2000, 2005, we were, you know, we probably spent a sent a dozen emails. Now the average SDR, I think, can send two, 300 emails. I mean, we we've certainly been able to spam more.
We've been able to do some more, but again, I don't know if we've been able to reach the gains that we're really talking about, know, that people really need, especially as some of these things get less and less effective, right? So we think about prospecting. We've hit so many different avenues there. Maybe it is time to change and do something different.
I'm really tripping out on this whole idea of interfacing with the technology like it's a person as opposed to it being a tool. That could just really change the way we think about technology. It sounds like you're driving that idea forward.
Yeah, and Clint, you said it actually better there because so many people say, can I log into your tool? And I'm like, no, it's not a tool. You don't like log in like your Salesforce. You interact with it via the channels that you would interact with a teammate, Slack, phone, email, SMS. And then all of the activities that these cloud employees do are brought into Salesforce. It looks like a regular BDR. Where do you see your BDR activities? say,
Well, we see it as an activity in Salesforce. Well, that's where you'd see a cloud employees activity. Well, you're telling me that I can't log in to, can I log in to the cloud employees? No, you can't. You literally can't. But it's a general philosophy concept there where we need to start, I think, moving from, and it's hard, it's been hard for me, because again, we're just so used to another tool that I use to help me.
Gabe Larsen (18:34.658)
Now don't get me wrong, there's a setup and a configuration, but when it comes to interfacing with cloud employees, you do not log into Gong and look at a transcript. You talk to it, you interact with it.
So, back to Greg's question about metrics. you then, you're measuring your signals cloud employees the same way you'd measure any other employee?
That's exactly right. metrics. So what you do is, and I've got a great one, you know, we just were working with a big company in the restaurant business and they're trying to get a little more scale on their SDR team. And yeah, we write in their Salesforce reports, they just have their eight current SDRs and then they had our cloud employee as line number nine. And what does that cloud employee do on the funnel? How many activities, how many meetings, how many conversations, how many appointments, how many opportunities?
We just benchmarked it against a regular employee and the results got pretty interesting.
I bet.
Clint (19:33.195)
2x, 3x, 5x? what kind of differences are you seeing out there?
Couple things is you see from a cost perspective, one of the biggest things that came out of that one, almost a 90 % less in cost per opportunity. Now, why would that be? Well, cloud employees typically are about 1 fifth to 1 10th the cost. So if you're paying an FDR, for example, $100,000 or $120,000 fully burdened, you're probably playing a cloud employee.
maybe 15 to 20K. So if you're paying, and again, just basic math there, this isn't rocket science. If you're paying 15K and you're getting, let's see, similar outputs, and I'm just saying a one-to-one ratio, and you're paying 120K for one and 15K for another, that's going to give you a lower cost per opportunity.
Well, no, yeah, certainly.
What are you talking about? I was getting more more excited.
Gabe Larsen (20:32.47)
So that's the bottom line. there are a couple of things though. We are still seeing great human employees, like on the SDR side, they are outperforming. If you just go one to one, they're better on the phone. People, certain audiences, we can get into this, certain audiences are less likely to talk to AI on the phone. Enterprise audiences, I'm having a hard time getting the CEO of Netflix on the phone. He won't do it. But a restaurant owner, I get them on the phone a lot and they are okay to talk to it.
Audience matters, right? That's a big one. Phone is different than email. Email's a little bit harder to garner if it's AI or not. So long story short, though, humans are still more effective. you said this, Greg, the 24-hour rule then comes into play. What if I can all of a sudden, and these cloud employees, you guys, you can supercharge them to an nth degree. I've got cloud employees taking 100,000 phone calls a month, one cloud employee. They manage 66 conversations simultaneously.
I mean, you want to talk about a power dialer, 1,200 phone calls in under an hour? Come on, name a power dialer that's doing that right now. So you can supercharge them. So now you kind of start to add in, hey, if I got a BDR, how good are they? Our study right now says that the average talk time for a BDR is hanging around two hours a day. Two hours a day, talk time, actual on the phone time.
Yeah.
Gabe Larsen (22:01.408)
A cloud employee, they can go 24 hours a day and be consistent in your message. So the effectiveness starts to then outweigh that one-to-one instance where a human is often better on the phone. So there are a couple things going on there, but I think overall, yeah, SDRs is a great place to find if cloud employees can be an effective thing for you.
Great. We got a few minutes left. I'd like to know just maybe what's one more area that wowed you by a Signal Cloud employee.
Yeah, the customer service realm is, think, probably the most disrupted. think even the CEO of OpenAI, I he came out and said, customer service, we've probably reached the height in customer service reps that this world will ever see. From here, we're going to start going down. And I think customer service, if you are a company and you're seeing you've got reps, where's my order, password resets, and you were trying to do that via humans,
or even outsource BPO's in the Philippines. I think that's ripe for AI.
So Gabe, I mean, this sounds really interesting, but what's the cost structure like? mean, how does it really work when you're paying for this?
Gabe Larsen (23:16.302)
Yeah, know, for AI in general, I think there's just a lot of stuff going on in pricing in this whole SaaS world. know, most of us have come from the we have the on-prem version and then we have this seat based world and that obviously came out more with the Salesforce 2000 year 2000 era. And we're now in 2025. Many of us are still paying per seats. Does feel like we're ripe for something new.
You've heard about these models, usage or outcome based pricing and having done one for multiple years, it's still fairly messy. If I'm honest, Greg, you'll say, you know, pay per resolution, pay per ticket, pay per conversation. And it just, it's a little hard to forecast CFOs are pushing back. so I think it's an active debate where we're seeing the market move is again, back to the employee concept. How do you pay for an employee? Will you give them a salary? Well, how do you pay for a cloud employee? Will you?
I give them a salary then. So that's what we do. You pay a cloud employee based on an annual salary. Now, if you want a more advanced cloud employee, just like you want a director of marketing versus a manager of marketing or a senior director, you can pay more. You can get a more advanced cloud employee if you want to pay more. And those cloud employees have certain things they can do and not do. But ultimately, we think of it as a salary. And with that salary,
comes four core characteristics of a cloud employee. The channels and communication you work on, the tools that they come ready, they hook to your CRM, they work with your calendaring system, their knowledge base, you how much data and storage you want to throw into, and then ultimately the complexity of their intelligence. But I think we've got to go back to something more basic like that. So again, I think you use the idea of a salary-based employee to kind of hire these agentic entities.
I like that you're paying for skill set and paying for where they sit.
Gabe Larsen (25:13.484)
And look, the nice thing is a lot of people are like, Gabe, is that outcome based? it's like, you you tell me when you hire an SDR and they fail, they don't get you, they don't hit quota. Is that outcome? You fire them if they don't. Is that outcome based or not outcome based? I think it's pretty outcome based. Well, that's what it is with the cloud employee. You hire them to do a job and if the job isn't done, you fire them. Guys, that's so much different than a tool. If you hired a call recording tool and it didn't like,
Is that anywhere near an outcome? No, it just transcribed a call and you tried to use that call to help a seller see if they could ultimately sell better, which is the outcome you wanted. And again, very, very different dynamic because we're trying to hire these entities to do an outcome. And if they don't do the outcome, you fire them. And so I do actually think this is much closer to outcome based pricing than anything we've talked about. Because again, I do believe usage based pricing is
I don't think that's outcome-based pricing. You number of conversations. I pay 25 cents for every conversation my customer service rep has. I don't think that's an outcome that I want. I don't want more conversations. I want less.
Exactly. I'm tipping me over. I'm falling now for sure.
think the baits aren't right.
Clint (26:36.622)
All right, so one more question here I got for you. What types of companies are adopting cloud employees the most right now? Is there a certain profile that just really stands out as somebody who's thinking this is the best thing for them?
No, look, overall I'd say everybody is being asked to do more with less. So doesn't matter, I think, who you are. You're trying to find areas where AI can win. I would probably reframe your question. say I think there, I was mentioning that there's certain ICPs that right now are taking AI and they're accepting it more.
ideal customer profile.
Yeah, so if you're dealing with a high volume SMB environment, for example, let's say I know a company, they're getting 500 free trials, they sell to gyms all over the United States and Europe. That's an SMB audience. AI is a perfect use case for you because you have a high volume transactional sale and there's no way in heck that you can have BD, you can't.
You couldn't hire enough BDRs to deal with 500 trials a day or a week. That's too much, you guys. It's too much. Walk them through the trial, set them up, respond to them on time. Who are you kidding, right? So it's those types of companies that have high volume or transactional SMBs that I think they're diving in way faster, and they're seeing better results. As you move up that ladder, and again, I mentioned this, but if you're trying to sell Boeing jets to the government of Saudi Arabia,
Gabe Larsen (28:10.894)
It look there is AI that's helpful, but now you're talking more about augmentation How do I help the the salesperson understand his audience better? I'm not going to talk to the customer No way you'd put an AI in front of the prince of Abu Dhabi or something like that So so but I do think there it's a different type of AI. It's more augmentation on the SMB side You're seeing more replacement as they do this new PLG world
that is just phenomenal, PLG with AI is crazy. I mean, you can just do so much more. So that's maybe how I'd think about that Clint, you've seen that separation.
Fantastic. Well, that's definitely our audience out there as well. So I think that's some good news for them.
You
Clint (29:05.198)
As we get ready to wrap up, we have a segment that we do in each of our podcasts called the AI Challenge.
The AI Challenge is a takeaway assignment for our audience to begin to get comfortable playing around with the different AI tools. So Clint, tell us about this episode's AI Challenge.
Today we learned about how the company Signals has built the next generation of agentic AI. They have a sophisticated approach that they call cloud employees. Now it's your chance to interact with a cloud employee and decide for yourself if they are good enough, realistic enough to be on your team. I challenge everyone listening to go to getsignals.ai and try out their live demo. This is not.
yesterday's chatbot. It shouldn't take any more than a few minutes for you to become pretty darn amazed.
have a blog article on the promptthis.ai website that describes the step-by-step instructions to learn how to use these AI tools. See the podcast show notes below for the link. Once you're finished, share your experiences in the blog comments and we'll share the best insights on a future episode.
Clint (30:25.678)
Cool, Gabe, we really appreciate you being with us today and sharing those insights with us.
100 % you guys, fun to talk AI, so much going on, always changing, but always happy to brainstorm and talk through it. I think we're all learning together, you know?
Where's the best place for somebody listening to today's podcast to learn more?
Yeah, look, mean, Greg mentioned it. I like to be a little bit obnoxious, you know, a little bit obnoxious on LinkedIn. So word of warning there, but find me on LinkedIn. Would love to engage in the conversation just under Gabe Larson.
Great. And what's your company website?
Gabe Larsen (31:02.254)
Yep, signals you can find us at get signals.ai
Well, there go, folks. Another podcast episode where you learn how to put AI to work for your business with cloud employees. That's Prompt This.
my goodness, thank you so much for joining Clint and Greg today. Isn't it just fantastic? You can find all of those amazing Prompt This episodes, plus some really in-depth articles at www.promptthis.ai. Just think about all the knowledge waiting for you there. And hey, don't forget to click that follow button below. We are absolutely thrilled to have you with us and...
Can't wait to see you back. Keep shining.
