Jeremy Balius: Welcome to Go to Market Playmakers, where we bring you winning go-to market strategies from the industry’s best. Each episode, we sit down with B2B Tech, SaaS founders, executives, and industry playmakers who’ve mastered the art of taking products and services to market. Whether you’re scaling a startup, refining your go-to-market motion, or driving revenue growth through a channel program or a partner ecosystem, this is where you’ll learn the plays that work.

I’m your host, Jeremy Balius. Today’s theme is AI led go to market, how AI agents are reshaping the SAS revenue team. I am joined by Dave Boyce from Winning by Design. Dave is the Executive chairman and executive Vice principal of Product at Winning by Design, which is a global B2B growth advisory firm that helps recurring revenue companies architect sustainable growth.

Currently, Dave and the team are serving over a thousand organizations around the world, including companies like Adobe and Uber Eats and Calendly. He’s also a board member at Forrester focusing on product development, corporate strategy with them.

He’s teaching at b’s, Marriott School of Business teaching product-led growth, B2B, sales, marketing, and career strategy. And he’s just written a book on product-led growth called Freemium. It’s publishing through Stanford University Press in August of 2025.

This is such a fascinating conversation. Thinking about the ways in which go-to market is evolving and shifting, and the different roles it fulfills within phases of go to market. It’s really interesting to hear about the way that Dave is thinking about, uh, what is possible, what he has seen already, the way that he is talking to companies as they evolve their go-to market motions.

It is really shifted the way I’m thinking about AI in the context of go to market. I really hope this adds as much value to you as it did for me. Let’s get straight into the conversation.

hey Dave, I’m so stoked to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on.

Dave Boyce: I love it. Jeremy. Stoked is a good word for a Californian move to a Sydney, Australia. That’s good.

Jeremy Balius: That’s it. You know it. Hey, um, we’re here talking about AI led go to market, but before we get into that topic, um, let’s take a look backwards and start with your origin story.

I’m really keen to hear about how you got to where you are today.

Dave Boyce: Oh man. Well, um, long story, obviously I’ll, I’ll shortcut it, but I was born, um, I was raised in Oklahoma, oldest of eight kids. Um. And lots of love in our family. Really lucky to have two parents who stuck together and supported us, but no money, right?

Like I’m the oldest and I wore hand-me-downs from whom you may ask people who felt sorry for us, um, but only because we didn’t have money, not ’cause we didn’t have, you know, supportive family. It was amazing. And then I was just, just lucky to, you know, to be told that I could. Do what I wanted to do. So went to university at, uh, university of Texas and then at BYU, spent some time in Germany, um, and then kind of moved around kind of following, just trying to figure out like what’s my fit.

So I helped building cell five SaaS companies. I did an MBA along the way and, um,

Jeremy Balius: wow.

Dave Boyce: And just a curious, you know, curious guy. Just finished writing a book and, um. I just feel really lucky Jeremy to be able to, you know, and I think we are lucky to do what we do. Don’t you think?

Jeremy Balius: I feel so lucky. You know, it’s, it’s such an exciting space to be in, and every day is just so different.

You background is so varied and you’ve done so much in, that span of time. What’s the start of winning by design? Where did that. Come together for you?

Dave Boyce: Yeah. Well we sold a company about four years ago, um, called inside sales.com. And then, and that was, like I said, the fifth, my fifth company, you know, and not all of them had terrific outcome.

Some of them you got get away with your life, some of them you do a little better. Um, but you know, I was, at the time I was 50, I’m 57 now. I was 53, like, um. So now what do you know? What am I gonna do with this next chapter? Am I gonna operate again? Are we gonna build something from scratch? Am I going to take the helm of a company?

And I just kept thinking, I gotta, you know, I actually wanna write a book. And I actually had been teaching, I wanna teach some more. And, and I’m really curious about product led growth. Jeremy, like, you know, some of these companies that. Um, that I worked with and for, um, had products selling themselves. Um, and I, and I really came to the conclusion that that self-service is gonna be a big theme.

And it’s not gonna relent like buyers wanna be in control. They’d like to self-service their way into kind of using products and services. And so I called the founder, I’m not the founder of Win By Design. I called the founder, a guy named Jocko and said, Hey, what are you doing about PLG? And he’s like, why do you ask?

I’m like. I think the future belongs to it. And he said, you know, we’re watching the same trends. We agree. We don’t know the timing. Do you want to come over here and figure it out? And I was like, you know what? If I’m writing a book and I get an offer from someone like Jocko at a place, like when anybody designed to go figure something out, like that seems like a dream scenario for this chapter of my career.

Jeremy Balius: Incredible. Uh, really cool to see how, um. Uh, it’s just aligned for you in a way that, uh, I feel like you, you put good things out there and good things happen, and it really seems like that’s what’s happened for you.

Dave Boyce: Thank you so much. I do feel lucky that way. Yeah. For every chapter, like, I love building, and right now I love, um, you know, documenting and frameworking and helping, you know, a generation of builders, uh, move even faster.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. And moving fast I think is probably an awesome segue to, to get into what we’re talking about here. Um, we’re talking about a, a big shift here and really looking to you to understand in what ways you believe AI agents are reshaping sasco to market. From 2025 onwards,

Dave Boyce: um, it seems like every day you wake up there’s something new, right?

Yeah, A new update with core model, a new, um, a new process that’s been automated. A new agent that’s been announced, or an agent builder platform. I, um, I mean relevance AI’s right there and, uh, Sydney, like there down the road. That’s right, right down the road, like cranking stuff out. It’s amazing. Um, you know.

Yes, agents and we’re gonna see more and more agents. And agentic AI is a thing. And um, but even predictive AI and even, um, you know, even simple kind of automations are really, really impacting the way we go to market. They’re making, in some cases we’re replacing humans. In some cases we’re doing tasks on behalf of humans, and some places we’re making humans better and smarter.

But I see it everywhere. And you say, you know, 2025. Yeah. I fundamentally believe if you’re running a company right now, or go to market for a company right now, you have to get your or in the water on AI this calendar year, because if you’re launching next calendar year and you’re standing on stage and saying, Hey, we’re gonna get to AI this year, it, no, it, it’s too late.

Like you need to be able to point to something that you’ve already got working, that you’ve already got piloted, that you already have some initial results from. It doesn’t mean you have to have it all figured out. But missing. This is a very fast running train and you can’t afford to miss a fast running train.

You gotta get on it.

Jeremy Balius: I concur. We’re talking about more than just prompting large language models, aren’t we?

Dave Boyce: Right.

Jeremy Balius: This isn’t, just help me write an email. Is it,

Dave Boyce: you’re absolutely right. And, but if you’re not doing that, then get, then get to that, you know, no shade. Okay. Like if you’re not, if, if you don’t, if you’re not prompting large, kind of generalized large language models to help you write emails or copy or help you, uh, do analysis, market analysis or competitive analysis, then fine start there.

But we can do so much more than that. Um, you know, we. We can still use those same generalized models, but maybe a, an enterprise version of them to, to kind of save, um, to do fine tuning on kind of how we are approaching, kind of essentially building flows and building agents. You see some of that with deep research that is now being released like.

You know, chat, TBT allows you to do deep research, which is a, which is a nested series of tasks that they’ve prompt engineered. But we can prompt engineer stuff like that too, to get complicated things done. And then you can go to like the relevance AI of the world and hire an agent that’s been pre-engineered to, uh, to execute a task.

And all of that’s gonna come together with human motions to redefine kind of how go to market works. And honestly. We need, we need to be figuring it all out. As revenue leaders, we gotta be figuring it all out. So, uh, no shade. If you’re starting with just prompt engineering, a generalized model that can get you a long ways forward.

Jeremy Balius: Tell me about. Where did the thinking initially start? As you are thinking about ai, agentic, ai as well as go to market, where did the early steps start for you in terms of, hang on, AI and agents can start taking over. Go to market tasks more, uh, broadly.

Tell me about those early days.

Dave Boyce: Yeah, so for me, the thought process started, um, when I was, you know, thinking when I was writing this book, right? Because, you know, you, you think about also right down the road from you, Atlassian. Yeah. They’re here too. Right. You know, they literally, and I was two engineers who couldn’t afford to hire salespeople, who figured, Hey, we’re selling to other engineers.

They don’t like to stock to salespeople anyway. Why don’t we just build a product that you can easily find and purchase on your own and deploy on your own? And you know, now they’re a $57 billion company. Yeah. That’s all kind of, that’s an automated go to market motion that we call product led growth.

And then it happened with, then it happened with, um. DocuSign and Dropbox and Twilio and, uh, Zendesk and, and now it’s in Zoom and, uh, Canva and Slack. Like we have all these examples of automated GTMs. So that’s in my brain. And then I see AI show up, and then I’m like, wait a second. Mm-hmm. Like, it takes a while to.

To program in GTM steps into a product, and I’d done it before. Like it takes a lot of iteration, but, and, and the simpler the product, the easier it is to, uh, make it kind of, you know. Plg.

Jeremy Balius: Mm-hmm.

Dave Boyce: But now AI doesn’t actually, AI can actually handle complex things. It can handle multi-step processes. It can explain or help you configure.

And I’m like, woo, that opens a whole world and. Agents still weren’t with like, weren’t still the thing, but I could see it coming, like it’s coming, like AI’s gonna step into this gap. If I can have a conversation with AI over just chat GPT, you know, three years ago, then why couldn’t I have a conversation with AI about purchasing a product or configuring a product or, um, of course I could.

And now we’ve got, you know, now we’ve got the language to match that and the capability around, um, agents. But Jeremy, um, some of those agents show up customer facing, like we’re talking like I was postulating, but there’s some other stuff that happened that I really didn’t see coming that’s more about automating kind of behind the scenes and all of that is super, super exciting.

Jeremy Balius: It really is. And I think what you’ve teased out here is there’s a level of automation. But it’s the power is the reasoning capabilities, right? It’s structured to be able to handle and think with guardrails, but it’s doing activities without necessarily, uh, having been scripted.

Right?

Dave Boyce: Well, I love, I love the guardrails. Um, concept, and you could think about those guardrails as a framework. So, you know, if AI can do anything, what is it gonna do? Oh, it’s, you know, that’s where prompt engineering comes into play and we’re gonna give it an objective. Okay, got it.

But then within a framework, you know, it, it can be also be flexible without crossing over a guardrail. And, and this is what, this is why winning by design was a perfect place, um, for me to collaborate and really go heads down is ’cause. When by design has the best frameworks in the world around GTM, like, you know, example is, um, spiced, which is a really, really simple framework for taking a human conversation and making it machine readable.

Um, know we didn’t think of it that way when, or Jocko didn’t think of it that way when it was being invented. It was just, it was just a discovery framework situation. Let me find out the situation. Let me find out the pain. Let me find out the impact. Let me discover what the critical event is that we’re working towards and a decision.

But now you think about agents are listening to all of our calls, note takers are listening to all their calls, and and I could either just summarize the call. I. Per as like a really good high level summary of what happened. Or I can normalize the call to a framework like spiced and now it becomes machine readable.

’cause I can hand it off and I can increment that framework as I hand it off down the, uh, down the chain. Um, I. There’s lots of frameworks like that, you know, processes and um, and uh, uh, that, uh, that, that a AI can operate within, but with enough flexibility to go make its own decisions within those guardrails that you were talking about, and that unlocks a lot of potential in my opinion.. So if you think about like, you know, recurring revenue business, it, um. You know, you, you bring a new customer into the journey, you know, typical funnel stages, awareness, interest, you know, education, decision, you know, great.

Amazing. But that first commitment that a customer makes to, um, is the beginning of her journey, not the end of her journey. So a lot of our traditional sales and marketing funnels look like this. And they have a top and a bottom, and then they stop.

Jeremy Balius: Yes. Right.

Dave Boyce: At. That just doesn’t describe the whole thing.

Like what about onboarding and engagement and usage and renewal and expansion? Like you could turn it on its side and turn it into like a bow tie where the funnel actually opens back up as the customer expands their usage shares with their colleagues extends across departments. So I get a net revenue retention that’s north of a hundred, and now I have a bow tie instead have a funnel.

So now you think about, okay, that’s the whole customer journey, which pieces of that can be automated? Uh. A lot. We, we just, I just, uh, sponsored a project at Win by Design, where we went and studied eight different. Aspects of the bow tie to figure out which agents are, you know, currently deployed, what are the current, um, verified case studies of real kind of benefit.

And there’s some really interesting ones that have come out and not the ones that you would think, you know, there’s a lot of hype around the ai SDR like inbound. Mm-hmm. Demand qualification. Mm-hmm. Got it. You know, that’s a thing, but, but here’s one that I didn’t see coming. AI coaching. Right. So now I’m a salesperson and I don’t get a lot of chances to practice negotiating a high stakes deal ’cause I only get my hooks into a high stakes kind of high dollar deal once in a while.

What if, and, and by the way, my manager doesn’t show up. Offering to role play with me enough either for me to hone my skills. What if I could just role play with an AI I could get good at, I could get good at, um, resolving concerns at negotiating complex deals at stakeholder management. That’s like a.

Thing, and it’s way better than sitting through a training class and then hoping that I get to use that on game day and hoping that I’m sharp on game day. Um, there’s some other things, you know, like tracking signal across the bow tie, like there’s a lot of information locked in this very conversation that you and I are having.

If we were a customer and a cellar, that’d be even more information and a lot of that’s in the word choice and the sentiment. And, and so I, you know. If an AI is listening, an AI can not only summarize the conversation, but like I said, normalize it to something like spiced and then start to point out if I’m a prospect, what you know, what to pay attention to if I’m an existing customer, what to pay attention to.

And now I can handicap an overall pipeline management, um, process with not what the rep thinks in her head or through her kind of. Quota, a tainted glasses, but what the customer’s actually saying in their own words and that, and so that, that’s a way better pipeline management, um, uh, set up than the one we had before.

And there’s lots of other examples, Jeremy, like, um, one, my, one of my favorites is renewals. Okay, I already have a contract. I’ve already negotiated the terms. I already have the price. I’ve already configured the solution. I’ve already deployed the solution. It’s already creating benefit, and now we’re at the one year birthday.

Why don’t I just say, yes, please, gimme another year. But so many of us don’t have automated renewals. Like we insert a human at that point. Sometimes a human needs to get engaged, like if the customer’s shaky or we have, you know, but 80% of the time, why don’t I just automate that renewal? So there, there’s a lot of places that we can deploy automation, in my opinion.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, that’s fantastic. As I’m thinking about this as, say, a SaaS leader, and I’m starting to look at my own bow tie, what are your recommendations for me to start? Yeah, I’m not automating anything yet. I’ve got people across every stage of the bow tie. What would I start looking at as I’m thinking about AI opportunities, um, scaling up, um, uh, potentially looking for AI slash human, uh, early stages.

Dave Boyce: Yeah, I love it. Tell me where to start. I love it. I love that you said AI slash human too, because that’s what our teams are gonna look like in the future. Right? Okay. We’re gonna be. Human. Robot. Robot, human, human robot, like we’re gonna be hybrid teams managed by, I don’t know, a human, a robot. I.

We gotta look forward to that. You know, look ahead and kind of contemplate what that looks like. And having a framework in place that allows humans to be operating against the same playbook as robots is gonna really help us. But you asked me like, where would I start? I’m doing nothing. Nothing’s automated.

I’m doing nothing. How do I stand on stage at my 2026 kickoff and say, guys. We’ve got some good early experience, some good early wins, and we’re going in. So three places I would look at. Um, one I would definitely look into. Um, coaching. Coaching makes your people better. I. Um, coaching is something that managers don’t have a lot of time to do, and coaching is something that you can fairly easily train an AI agent to do it.

You’re not risking the relationship with the customer, you’re not putting the agent out in between your, you know, salespeople in the customer. You’re literally, this is literally how do you help your salesperson get better at her job in a way that feels natural and that gives her lots of reps, super easy to do.

Second one that I would do is, uh, or that I would look at. It depends on your, um, uh, go to market motion. But if you’ve done no automation, you’re probably selling up market kind of enterprise. And you may once in a while get an RFP. Those are the worst. Nobody likes filling those out. Right, right. Like, how about an agent to help you do that?

Like, like this is what, this is what AI is made for. AI is made to consume huge amounts of data and simplify it and get it into like a form that you want to use it in. That’s like, that is an RFP. So if you’ve got an RFP repository or a product management or you know, product description repository or a competitive database, feed that into an AI’s brain and let an AI give you the first draft of your RFP.

It’ll make everybody happy, your se especially. Um, and then the third one is the one that you and I talked about, just renewals, like, um, that’s a super easy place to start. Renewals is super easy. Um, if you’ve automated nothing, automate renewal. It’s just about. Getting the option, the click to accept option in front of a customer.

And once you’ve proven that you can do that, you’ll probably have the confidence to go figure out what you can automate next.

Jeremy Balius: That is so practical. Uh, those three areas. That last one I can understand the immediate implement implications because we can. Define a sequence of events and define, uh, uh, automation opportunities across that. But I’d, I’d love to deep dive into the coaching one that you talked about. Yeah. Um, particularly because I think you’re right, sales teams are they, they receive training either on mass or uh, or via, um.

Via piece of software. But I wonder if the way that you’re talking and the way that I’m starting to picture this, is that the coaching from the agent is not just brand based and not based on their sales playbook, but it’s also tailoring itself to the individual’s strength. Am I, am I. Outta scope there, or is this where it’s heading, where , the agent can coach someone in the way that they need to be personally.

Dave Boyce: So I haven’t seen it quite as, as elegant as you just described, but it is heading there. Like I think you are on the absolutely right track. And, and what it is not is one dimensional, like, you know, you used to this, this was, I already told listeners how old I am, 57, but way back in the day, um, reps were trained.

To give the pitch in the mirror or to be able to give the pitch on demand, you know, like your manager shows up, you gotta be able to give the pitch like you, and you certify on the pitch. That’s not what this is. This is very interactive. The agent will interrupt you. The agent will, um, will ask you a hard question.

The agent will, agent will go on a tangent and you gotta bring them back in. So elements of what you said are, um. You know, I’m gonna have to deploy as me being a human, not just reciting something, but, but responding to what I’m hearing elements of that are there today, whether it’s leaning into my individual strengths or not, and getting to know me as a human.

I haven’t seen that piece yet, but that would be amazing.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. Okay. So, uh, I think I just defined my, uh, next product launch. So you’ve given us some good practical starting points as a leader. I’m thinking about those starting points, but I’m also thinking in the context of a future of where we have this hybrid robot and human go to market motion.

How do I evaluate success or how do I evaluate? The steps being successfully taken on that journey when I can’t really define what that journey’s going to be beyond the next couple of months.

Dave Boyce: Oh my, this is such a good question. I just came off the road, um, spent the last, I don’t know, I. 10 days with go-to market leaders and a couple of pretty major private equity portfolios.

And this is one of the things they’re asking too, ’cause they’re the, you know, the private equity owners are leaning on the CEOs and the CROs to embrace ai. And the CEOs and CROs are saying, are asking the question that you’re asking like, okay, you know, I’ll do it, but how do I know when it’s working? And what you really need is an ex is one thing that really resonated with these teams is if you can’t.

Measure an experiment, then why are you even running the experiment? Mm-hmm. Like an experiment with no measurement is no experiment at all. So I do need to indeed be able to measure, and I do need to be able to experiment because this is a brand new world and not everything’s gonna work the way it was advertised.

Right. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna experiment with stuff. For me, the, there are lots of ways, but the baseline kind of measurement is that bow tie. I’m gonna, I’m going to actually delineate that bow tie into stages. Um, awareness, education selection, commit onboarding, retention, expansion. If I’m in PLG, the names change, but the concept is the same.

And then I’m going to define what it means to move from one stage to the next. And then I’m going to kind of measure how fast things are moving on, at what conversion rate things are moving, and how many things are moving from it. Very simple data model. But if I have that, then I can run almost any experiment.

’cause what I’m trying to do is either get things to move faster or more reliably or in greater quantity. So if I’m running kind of up funnel marketing experience, this says it might be about getting more people into the top of the funnel or the left of the bow tie. If I’m running something around, like automating my.

RFP kind of thing. I might be trying to get my ses, my solution engineers to cover more deals because if they get leverage, ses are always in short supply, right? You want a solution engineer on every deal. You can’t afford it, so you only put it on your top deals. Well, maybe now I can get SES to work on more deals and I can actually show more expertise because they have, you know, AI working for them in the background.

Most of that I’m gonna see in those bow tie metrics. And then I just gotta define. I just gotta define it carefully. I gotta figure out if there’s some leading indicator metrics that give me even earlier signal. And then what we talk about Jeremy, is look for a minimum viable. Everyone’s heard those words, but minimum viable signal loop.

Jeremy Balius: Hmm. A

Dave Boyce: minimum viable signal loop. So what’s an experiment that you can run? That’s the lightest weight possible. That will tell you whether this is gonna have an impact and, and that’s gonna come in the way of signal. So, um, just figure that out, get really quick, kind of cycle time on that. If it’s not really moving the needle, scrap it, move on to the next one.

There’s lots of opportunities to, uh, for AI right now.

Jeremy Balius: I love it. Minimum viable signal loop. I just needed to restate it, so I remember that. That is awesome. in the evaluation and as CEOs and CROs are thinking about the future of the composition of the go to market team and sales functions and the ses, even SDRs. In what ways do you see roles fundamentally changing versus roles being

Dave Boyce: replaced?

Yeah, that’s a really good question. You know, one. One lens to use Jeremy is just to think about like, what is a, what is a robot better at than a human and what is a human better at than a robot? Mm. That’s just one lens.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. You know,

Dave Boyce: robots are, and when I say robot, I really mean ai, right?

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Dave Boyce: AI have better memory, they have better processing speed.

They can process more information. They’re better at time zones. They can scale better and they can do more rep, uh, and they don’t get tired. They can do rapid. Repetitious tasks. So anything that has to do with kind of scaling or computational power or information retrieval and access or kind of large, large processing.

Lemme give that to a robot. What are humans good at? We’re good at empathy. We’re good at reading body language. We’re good at stakeholder management, we’re good at politics. Um, so anything that has to do with kind of helping a customer have the courage to move forward in a deal. Robots can’t do that nearly as well as you or I could.

So a lot of the roles are gonna, are gonna kind of bifurcate like that. Like I think the AE is gonna become more of a strategist, like a strategy partner for her customers. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I think A CSM is gonna become more of a, a strategist in terms of like deployment, like t like tactically within my organization.

I think marketing is gonna become more, this is a, a big one is gonna become more of a hero maker. Um, like turning my existing customers into heroes. It’s not about can I, can I spot the SEO or SEM arbitrage opportunity? No, no, no. It’s about how do I get the narrative out there that puts the customer front and center.

Um, so, and, and I’m gonna partner with a robot to do the rest of it. Um, then you go up a click and you think, okay, well what about the managers? Managers are gonna have a pretty broad span of control. Like once you have. Robots and humans working for you. One manager can do a lot more. And, um, and, you know, leveraging like a coaching agent to help my rep show up well, or an RFP agent to help my rep show up well, or a GTM intelligence agent to take away all the note taking and kind of, um, pipeline tracking.

I can do a lot more. So I, I think everybody’s gonna click up and it’s sort of like the industrial revolution where, hey, wait a minute. I used to be the guy that wielded the shovel. Where’s my job going? Oh, you know where your job’s going. It’s going on the, on the backhoe. You’re gonna operate a giant steam shovel and now, now you’re gonna get a lot more work done, so don’t get used to this, you know, repetitive motion ’cause, ’cause the robots are gonna take that over.

Jeremy Balius: I think that’s also a really. Elegant way of saying that the shift in roles and functions levels up, uh, in ways that, and I like how you’re calling the individuals strategists more than anything because it sounds like what you’re saying is that the robots, the agents, the AI models. Aren’t good at emotive intelligence.

They’re not good at empathy, they’re not good at spotting and coaxing and, uh, maybe eliciting trust in ways that yeah, humans, uh, can only, um, and so these strategists who are, uh, leveling up also in their emotional intelligence at the same time are. Yeah, probably reaching heights that they never could have without these fundamental, repetitive tasks taken from them.

It’s so it’s, it sounds less of a threat.

Dave Boyce: Yeah. I think people will see it both ways, but I think the, the. The Optim, you know, the techno optimist way to see it is as an opportunity, right? Like I become, I become AI fluent and I lean into my humanity and I lean into my higher order thinking and all of a sudden, you know, I got, I got career security for days, right?

Um. I fight to keep a hold of that shovel. ’cause I really don’t want a robot taking it over. That’s probably not a, a, a smart career move.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. Well, on that note, what, what are the types of skill sets that you’re starting to see become really valuable in this space then?

Dave Boyce: Systems thinking.

Jeremy Balius: Hmm.

Dave Boyce: It’s, it’s a hard one, you know, it’s a hard one ’cause we’re not all kind of born systems thinkers, but this is the type of thing, you know, that like, I’ve got kids coming up through, uh, engineering and, and machine learning and kind of, you know, technical fields and everyone asks, well wait a second, there’s no jobs left for a CS grad.

And it’s true, like, uh, uh, Cal Berkeley had an 85% drop in their ability to place. CS grads.

Jeremy Balius: Wow.

Dave Boyce: Okay, great. But that’s if you’re a, you know, somebody writing code, because guess what, Claude’s writing the code now. But what if you’re a systems thinker? Like you’re, you’re actually thinking about the design, about what should happen and, and about how, um, how decisions are made.

Those people, you know, Stanford’s got a cool major called symbolic systems, you know, um. Ironically, you know, things like philosophers and pure mathematicians, they’re systems thinkers, right? So if I can click up a level and think, and think like a system, think about everything happens for a reason. What is that reason?

How do I impact that reason? How do I string those reasons together? Okay. Now I can actually program the robots. They’ll do the repetitive stuff. I don’t need to tell them. Move by, move instructions. I just need to tell them how to think and then they can go in and get these things done. To our earlier point, and it is a challenge, I’ll admit it, like not everyone is a philosopher.

Not everyone is a systems thinker, but we can push ourselves and let, let’s do what we can. I.

Jeremy Balius: You just got off the road. Speaking to a lot of company leaders. This is a broad question, but what are, what are common resistance points that you’re hearing from boards and leadership teams?

Dave Boyce: Um, less of a resistance point and more of a, um.

Just a genuine question. I, we’re all like, we’re all, we’re all humans. Like even CEOs are humans.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Dave Boyce: Even CFOs are humans and we’re just trying to go build shareholder value and, you know, build companies and, you know, and do well by our employees and our customers. And, um, so often we’ll have a conversation like the one you and I are having, and then a CEO will say that makes a ton of sense.

And. What do I do next?

Jeremy Balius: Mm. Like

Dave Boyce: how do I get started? Like, um, because all of the, all of the theory makes sense. The frameworks make sense. The what’s possible makes sense. But also I’m running a business and I gotta hit my numbers next quarter. And I’ve got, they don’t say this to me, but I know it’s true.

I’ve got two lawsuits pending. I’ve got one executive I’m trying to, um, exit from the company. I’ve got an open head count somewhere else on my executive team. I’ve got customers, you know. That are happy. I’ve got other customers that aren’t, and I have a customer event coming in a month. CEO’s got a lot going on, so when she hears this, she’s like, yeah, but how do I get started?

So what we really need is, again, probably systems thinkers to just help, just help make it easy, like. Go first for an assistive use case. You don’t have to replace humans all at once. You can just help them do their jobs better, then go for maybe an agent use case, then go maybe for an orchestrated use case.

But you don’t have to do it all at once. You need to be able to start, you need to be able to measure, you need to be able to experiment. And the number one thing that I say to that person, um, to just help them kind of get out of their head when thinking that that it’s gonna be, you know, difficult is, um.

Just channel your inner architect. Like, think about these things like a system. It may be, it may be 10 years since you were hands-on designing a product or hands-on designing a marketing work, uh, flow or hands-on designing, um, a sales process. Now you need to do it again, like roll your sleeves up because, because what got you here will not get you there.

Like doing more of what got you here. Is like committing to the past, but, but the rules have been redefined. So now you gotta kind of transport yourself back into that architect mode, roll your sleeves up, go shoulder to shoulder with your other leaders. ’cause what got them here is not gonna get them forward either.

And we gotta figure this out together, which means an experimental mindset, a systems thinker, mindset, measure everything. And, and your, your real race is against the AI native competitors that are coming to disrupt your space.

Jeremy Balius: You mentioned earlier that this is all accelerating faster, and if we look at the last year, the speed has just been mind blowing. I, I, I look back even just one year and think about how, uh. How, how far we’ve come just in, in one year and, and even the way that you and I are talking here, we unlikely wouldn’t have been just one year ago.

As, as we look forward and as you just talked about getting there, quote unquote, where do you see there in the next couple of years in terms of the maturity of AI led go to market? What would be normalized by then? That’s,

Dave Boyce: um, wow. I gotta put on my prophecy hat. Yeah. I dunno if I’ll get this right, but, um, you know,

I.

No funding source given that things are going faster. And then just to kind of underscore that point, and by the time I say this, and this episode airs, it’s gonna sound like ancient history, but, you know, um, rep and lovable and cursor, you know, they’re all getting to 10, 20, 50, a hundred cursor. Got to just last week announced they got to 500 million in a RR and the last employee count for we have for them is 30.

It’s probably more like. A hundred. Um, but it’s not more than a hundred, a hundred people, 500 million in a RR like that, that’s gravity defined. We’ve never seen that before. So, yeah. So now you’re like, oh, what’s gonna be true a year from now? Like a lot. Um, we’re gonna figure out how much of that revenue is sustainable.

We’re gonna figure out how much of it sticks. We’re gonna, we’re gonna figure out like how much of our monetization models are going to be, um, usage based, um, consumption based versus. You know, month to month versus annual contracts. Right now in SaaS, we think a lot about a RR, but I think a lot of that is gonna get challenged over the next few years.

And then you’re gonna turn around and say, all right, well how much of my, of my customer’s journey is going to be self-guided versus human assisted? Versus AI assisted. Mm-hmm. And, um, and I really believe it will be super normal, Jeremy, for the best companies to put that customer in, or, sorry, put that decision in the customer’s hands.

Jeremy Balius: Mm-hmm.

Dave Boyce: So, like, you know, we’re using a platform right now, like you said, for, uh. Um, for recording a two-way conversation, you know, to video that’s super high, kind of fidelity and manages both the video and the audio. I bet you never talked to a salesperson, um, to buy this. And if you did, you wouldn’t have to.

A year from now, I. And if you had questions when you were trying to buy this platform, you’d ask a robot and the robot would say, oh, you’re doing that? Okay, got it. So here’s what you wanna think about. And you need the silver package. And you’d be like, okay, thank you so much and I’ll come back when I need help.

And then if you got stuck with something, you know, you’d be helped. That’s gonna be totally normal to you. And then at some point you might raise your hand and say, this has been great, but now I gotta integrate it into blah, blah, blah thing that I use. And I really would like to talk to a human before I do that.

Cool. Lemme put a human on the phone. It’s, it’s just gonna be up to you. You’re gonna guide your own journey, in my opinion. And I think we’re just gonna see that as normal right now. Sometimes we get forced to talk to a robot when we don’t want to, and we get super frustrated. We’re in a phone tree with at and t or Bank of America or whatever, and we can’t like just gimme a human.

Or sometimes we get forced to talk to a human and we’re like. I didn’t want to commit a 30 minutes of my life to a, a demo. All I had was one question I wanted answered. But that stuff’s gonna converge and we’re gonna be able to choose what we want when we want it.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. Fascinating. just to close us off, you mentioned you’d been working on a book that you’d been learning so much about this whole world by. Writing this book, it’s coming out this year on Stanford University Press. Tell me more.

Dave Boyce: Thank you so much. Thanks for asking. Yeah, it’s three years in the making and a lot changed even over those three years.

You know, it was like, started writing right as we were seeing the core AI models come out. And, um, and as, as I said, I could see kind of what that was gonna do for product link growth. I went and studied a, a few different archetypes like the from scratch. Um, companies that built like Atlassian from the ground up.

You know, we’re, we’re not gonna hire salespeople like as a matter of principle, and when we do, it’s gonna be to help existing customers, not to sell to new customers. Atlassian’s a fascinating story, and then companies who started sales led and then added in. Uh, product led. So that’s like a HubSpot or a MongoDB.

Like we started in a totally different way and then we had to kind of go retrofit PLG into our model. Um, and then there’s kind of, and then there’s a bunch of really interesting use cases, which I think get way, way more interesting once AI arrives. Um, which is non-software and, and complicated products.

So you see everything like in my book from SAP, which is like the world’s most complicated product. How could that ever go to market in a self-service way? They’re actually innovating on that front. You would never think it with ign interactive demos and, and sandboxes to kind of pull you in before you have to make a decision.

And then companies like John Deere like. You know, the tractor company who’s, um, who’s literally turning the tractor into an information node on the farm to then figure out what supplies need to come in, what, uh, what the soil composition is, what the current moisture profile is, what the fertilizer, what the pest control needs to be, and then precision application.

It’s becoming like a moving computer and information node that really allows commerce to kind of flow into the farm in a way that we’ve never had before. So I think it’s pretty exciting. The book comes out August, uh, 26th and you can pre-order it now and, um, and it’s, it gets you started on the conversation, but it doesn’t get you started with your sleeves rolled up.

That’s something you gotta do yourself. I.

Jeremy Balius: Uh, I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy. This is very cool stuff. Dave, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you for what you’re doing.

Dave Boyce: I love it. Jeremy, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.