Demo • Vivun — The Difference Between an AI Agent and an AI Teammate

1157
03:16:13.950 –> 03:16:26.339
Julia Nimchinski: Awesome, thanks again. Next up, we’re featuring a demo of Vivin, and welcome to the show, Joseph Miller, co-founder and chief AI Officer, and Brett Crane, VP of Solutions.

1158
03:16:27.290 –> 03:16:28.580
Joseph Miller: How are you doing?

1159
03:16:28.580 –> 03:16:51.029
Joseph Miller: Good! Hey everybody, thanks for having us. I’m gonna try to be very brief here and get to a live demo that Brett’s gonna handle for you, so that’s where the juice and the meat is, so… But I want to give you guys a framing, so that when you go through the demo, you have some core ideas, in the back of your mind that really color why Vivint is very different, why we’ve approached Agentic development in a very different way.

1160
03:16:51.030 –> 03:17:04.509
Joseph Miller: So, this headline has been making its ways around the internet in the last few weeks. It was from an MIT study where they looked at corporations launching GenAI products and found that 95% of the products were failing.

1161
03:17:04.510 –> 03:17:16.400
Joseph Miller: And, of course, in this time, it also raises a bunch of questions of, like, is there… are we in this AI hype bubble? What’s going on? Like, what, you know, is this just all gonna come pop and crashing down?

1162
03:17:16.400 –> 03:17:33.080
Joseph Miller: And, I’m happy to say that, I’m pretty adamantly against that. I actually think that the hype is real, and we’re seeing the real deliveries at Vivin, that people are really… we’re really promised. But then the question is, like, why are so many other groups, struggling to realize those gains?

1163
03:17:33.080 –> 03:17:57.200
Joseph Miller: And what I think it is, is that people are building agents in exactly the wrong direction. The number one way that people sort of think about building agents is like a rag first sort of system, like a search sort of system. You might throw out a bunch of documents, or have it go out to the web, and then try to… and then you ask it, like, hey, tell me what you found, right? Like, you go reason about all of this data and give me back the insights.

1164
03:17:57.550 –> 03:18:01.119
Joseph Miller: Whereas, the way Vivint has done is we’ve sort of turned this on our head.

1165
03:18:01.120 –> 03:18:25.600
Joseph Miller: And we look at it and we say, we already know what is important about our domain and sales. We know what we mean when we say things like the value message and the sales process and the goals and challenges. We know what the implications are when one of those things changes in the data, what it suggests about the relationship between that and the other things. If, you know, if a new problem is surfaced during discovery or something.

1166
03:18:25.600 –> 03:18:38.620
Joseph Miller: We know how that is related to, say, the company’s strategy, or what the product offering has to be. And we mean this in a particular way, and LLMs really struggle with that sort of nuance. They have this problem.

1167
03:18:38.730 –> 03:19:03.590
Joseph Miller: where, if you have a really, distinct, you know, separately distinct things, but they are semantically similar, LLMs will obviously clobber those together. And so I think anybody that’s worked with agents or LLMs out of the box, even GPT-5 and the latest greatest, you run into these sorts of problems when you are in the practical world trying to do real work with them, is that, you know, they, they confuse terms.

1168
03:19:03.680 –> 03:19:27.840
Joseph Miller: They have a hard time chaining reasoning together, and so at Vivint, the way that we have architected this is to… is to work around that. We know that we sort of had a bet that LLMs were going to kind of run into this wall, and so far, we’ve, that’s been a… that’s turned out to be a pretty good bet. And so the way that we architected this is that what we actually asked the LLM to do is do what it does best, which is go read a bunch of unstructured data.

1169
03:19:27.840 –> 03:19:44.220
Joseph Miller: But I want you to structure it into this knowledge graph, or this domain model, that we a priori had designed from our decades of experience and expertise. So we take the expert knowledge, we ask the LLM, go find information, map it into this, and then let’s go reason from here.

1170
03:19:44.220 –> 03:19:53.879
Joseph Miller: And so, I’m gonna show you a quick video, and then I’m gonna shut up and hand it over to Brett so that you can see it, but I want you to look at this video and hold this in your back of your mind when you’re watching Brett’s demo.

1171
03:19:53.880 –> 03:20:17.599
Joseph Miller: Ava gets a query from the user, connects to the relevant concepts, and then walks a reasoning graph like this so that you can see, like, oh, something is going on with this prospect. That prospect, you know, has goals. Those goals have a particular strategy that’s related to problems. Like, that’s what’s going on behind the scenes when you watch this demo that Brett’s about to do.

1172
03:20:17.600 –> 03:20:33.839
Joseph Miller: And that is distinctively different than asking an LLM, here’s a document, go out to the web, you tell me what I should know. This is saying, we know what is important and how those things are related to each other in our domain, we’re sales experts, operate within that reasoning model.

1173
03:20:33.840 –> 03:20:41.779
Joseph Miller: So, with that, I want you to hold this picture in the back of your mind as you watch Brett go, go show off Ava, and I’ll sit back.

1174
03:20:42.710 –> 03:21:01.730
Brett Crane: Thanks, Joe. So yeah, that first visual that Joe just described, keep that in your head, because what we’re going to be showing you first is how does that actually make its way into our product? And so, there’s two really important things here. One is the knowledge that sellers need, we’re going to give that to Ava. We’ve already done that by design, how we’ve architected the system.

1175
03:21:01.770 –> 03:21:21.580
Brett Crane: Ava takes that in as training, so you can feed Ava things like your product documentation, your sales process, ask her to go, you know, scour the web for some information, and then she’ll tell you about what she knows. Things like, what are your products? Who are you selling against? What are your competition? What is your sales process? She’ll know all those things inherently in the system.

1176
03:21:21.580 –> 03:21:37.480
Brett Crane: And that will be the foundation for how she operates as an AI teammate alongside of you. It’s… effectively, think about how you bring in a new person. She needs to know those same things as a seller to work alongside of them to be effective. She’ll also tell you where she doesn’t know things, and continue the conversation to improve over time as well, too.

1177
03:21:37.610 –> 03:21:40.950
Brett Crane: With that context, so she has the knowledge of your sellers.

1178
03:21:40.970 –> 03:21:48.000
Brett Crane: then separately, she needs to sort of have the context of your sellers, which is, where do they interact with customers, right? Things like.

1179
03:21:48.000 –> 03:22:02.059
Brett Crane: calendar invites, things like email, things like web conferencing, like we’re on Zoom here, Slack, other places like that as well. So we connect those systems to Ava so she has the knowledge of your sellers and the context that your sellers have as they’re working with prospects and customers.

1180
03:22:02.330 –> 03:22:19.570
Brett Crane: With that in mind, I’m gonna take a step back out of this, like, how do you get Ava sort of set up and connected? And I’m gonna move into what an AE would actually go do with that. So how would they leverage Ava as an AI teammate? So the first thing I wanted to talk about is, like, I’m an AE, I get an account, I need to go prep.

1181
03:22:19.570 –> 03:22:35.039
Brett Crane: I’m not going to dig in deep, because I think we just saw a demo that showcased a little bit of that as well, too. But we have the concept of a lot of the things that you might want to go do, like account research, things like looking into what the stakeholders should be engaging with or are engaging with, competitive analysis.

1182
03:22:35.040 –> 03:22:47.440
Brett Crane: even coaching if we want to as well, too. So Ava can help you with all those sort of, like, popular things that you would go do when you start to prepare for an account. I’ll give you just a quick example of, like, a simple, concise version of research right here that Ava can go help

1183
03:22:47.670 –> 03:22:48.640
Brett Crane: a rep for.

1184
03:22:48.910 –> 03:23:07.640
Brett Crane: So, in theory, you know, we’re prepared on the deal, we know what we’re about to go do, we’re working with this fictitious company, Leverick. And by the way, my fictitious company here is called Contactile. So, so we’re trying to sell the Contactile product to Leverk here. The next thing that I want to go do is just make sure I feel confident about what I should be going to do to tackle this deal.

1185
03:23:07.640 –> 03:23:28.619
Brett Crane: I can kick off a deal strategy session with Ava, and I can do that in a variety of other ways. Like, a lot of our customers are saying, hey, prompting is sort of too hard, I can ask Ava, you know, any question here, and we could go do that. But also, we’re hearing that other modalities tend to be a little easier for people to operate. Sellers like to talk, right? And so, we have the ability to talk to Ava.

1186
03:23:28.620 –> 03:23:40.220
Brett Crane: from a voice standpoint, as well as I’m actually going to pull in the avatar here, for us to talk to. So I hope the audio comes through on Zoom. Joe, give me a sort of a thumbs up if you hear it as well, but,

1187
03:23:42.640 –> 03:23:46.380
Brett Crane: Hello. How can I assist you with your sales needs today?

1188
03:23:46.480 –> 03:23:49.689
Brett Crane: Hey Ava, what should we do next to try to win this deal?

1189
03:23:52.350 –> 03:23:53.420
Brett Crane: arm.

1190
03:23:53.570 –> 03:23:59.900
Brett Crane: The next best step is to schedule a detailed demo with Leverk to address their key requirements and product gaps.

1191
03:24:00.150 –> 03:24:08.580
Brett Crane: Focus on showing how Contactual’s unified platform can streamline their marketing tools, provide real-time campaign insights, and automate sales territory management.

1192
03:24:08.880 –> 03:24:23.730
Brett Crane: Also, be ready to discuss how we handle multi-touch revenue ad… Alright, so I’ll pause her there, because one of the things you probably heard her start to talk about was the details of products, what they do, the value they provide. This is all back to that graph that Joe showed a moment ago.

1193
03:24:23.730 –> 03:24:29.889
Brett Crane: Or Ava is trained on, how do you sell? What are your products? What’s the value, what are the customer stories? All those things that Ava knows.

1194
03:24:29.890 –> 03:24:46.129
Brett Crane: So, sellers can become confident by prepping with Ava, getting advice, doing things like role-playing, absolutely possible there as well, too. Not a lot of time for this demo, but one thing that we’ve seen a lot of our customers doing is preparing and speaking with that, you know, that face and getting that live interaction as well, too.

1195
03:24:46.340 –> 03:25:03.810
Brett Crane: So because we’re hooked into the calendar, you know, Ava said, hey, the next thing you should probably go do is a demo, Ava also prepares me, pulls in the information from the calendar, all the conversations that are happening, whether it’s on a Zoom like this, whether it’s email or Slack that’s direct connected with the customer, all those things can provide context, so Ava can provide me a meeting brief.

1196
03:25:03.810 –> 03:25:08.640
Brett Crane: as to what I should go do to win… excuse me, to have a successful demo with my team.

1197
03:25:08.710 –> 03:25:27.000
Brett Crane: So she gives me, like, the brief, the agenda, what we’re going to be doing in the demo, and some notes to look out for, and things like that, too. So, starting to feel a little bit better about this. I’ve prepped with Ava, maybe I’ve done some role play, I’ve figured out what I’m going to do on this meeting, and off we go onto the meeting. So that’s… that’s sort of the next place that Ava joins me, is not just in the preparation work, but actually in the live work.

1198
03:25:27.000 –> 03:25:33.969
Brett Crane: I’m gonna cross my fingers and hope this works, because it’s a little complicated to execute on a Zoom here, but I’m gonna pull up a Google Meet meeting.

1199
03:25:33.970 –> 03:25:39.419
Brett Crane: I’m gonna join that meeting, and you can imagine that prospects and other customers might go join this meeting as well, too.

1200
03:25:39.660 –> 03:25:45.829
Brett Crane: I’m going to have Ava join this meeting, so you should see her try to pop into my Google Meet.

1201
03:25:45.960 –> 03:25:54.420
Brett Crane: So she’d be one of those other boxes that’ll join alongside of my prospects, of my customers, that would be here, and I’m going to admit her into the meeting.

1202
03:25:54.870 –> 03:26:03.929
Brett Crane: So we should see her popping into this meeting. As she joins, I want to point out a couple of things… things, excuse me. One, I can control what she does as a seller.

1203
03:26:04.030 –> 03:26:12.799
Brett Crane: So some customers might not be comfortable with seeing a face of an avatar. You could decide not to do that. Some customers might not want her to say anything.

1204
03:26:12.800 –> 03:26:28.230
Brett Crane: And you can keep her silent to do that. She’s transcribing in the background regardless. And one of the things that we’ll be doing in the very near future is she will also be surfacing live contacts, like, what are questions, how can I help provide those answers to you live, and even you could have her go say those things as well, too.

1205
03:26:28.240 –> 03:26:32.940
Brett Crane: So I’m gonna bring her off mute. She’s in this Google Meet over here, you can hopefully see the little box down there.

1206
03:26:33.200 –> 03:26:39.710
Brett Crane: I’m gonna ask her a question. Ava, any relevant customer stories here that you can talk about for the Contactile Engage product?

1207
03:26:43.800 –> 03:26:44.680
Brett Crane: Sure.

1208
03:26:44.840 –> 03:26:49.079
Brett Crane: For Contactual Engage, one strong customer story is ESPN Inc.

1209
03:26:49.320 –> 03:26:58.820
Brett Crane: They unified their multi-channel messaging using Engage, which led to a 35% increase in engagement and a smoother, brand-consistent experience that boosted ticket sales and viewership.

1210
03:26:59.000 –> 03:26:59.780
Brett Crane: Anna…

1211
03:26:59.910 –> 03:27:12.269
Brett Crane: Alright, so I interrupted her right there because, you know, she could keep going. The interesting thing there is that you can imagine as a seller, you get that question, you know it’s in your memory bank somewhere, you might not be able to pull up the right one.

1212
03:27:12.270 –> 03:27:24.640
Brett Crane: Ava can be there to help you either live like that, or surface it in a text so that the seller can read that and tell that live. So, up to you how you want to engage that way, but that’s what Ava’s trying to do, is pull from her sales knowledge, like we talked about, the training she has.

1213
03:27:24.640 –> 03:27:40.060
Brett Crane: your products, your customers, your competition, your sales process, and help you live in these different interactions. So I’m actually going to kick Ava out of this. I’m going to also remove myself from the Google Meet, and what we’re simulating there is that, you know, the demo went well, let’s just say.

1214
03:27:40.110 –> 03:27:52.779
Brett Crane: So, demo goes well, deal progresses, I’m a rep, and it’s time to get my butt kicked on the forecast call on Monday or Friday. In order to prevent that, maybe? Abe was also there in the background doing a bunch of work. One of those is the deal review.

1215
03:27:52.860 –> 03:28:12.649
Brett Crane: MedPick deal reviews, this is just my example in the demo. If you do, you know, banned, spiced, whatever it might be, we can provide these in a different… in all the different frameworks that are out there. But this is going to be that unbiased view of, I’m connected to systems, I know what’s happened with my customers, I know our process, and Ava can start to score that for the salesperson, and even for sales managers as well, too, as you might imagine.

1216
03:28:12.710 –> 03:28:24.630
Brett Crane: So as a rep, I can see that I have a hole in my metrics, because I know there are things that are important qualitatively, but I’ve not gotten actual hard figures associated with that. We know the pain is tied to business impact, but we don’t know the numbers.

1217
03:28:24.630 –> 03:28:32.149
Brett Crane: Really good example where I might want to dig in and say, like, how do I actually improve my ability to boost my metric score for the M in MedPick here?

1218
03:28:32.150 –> 03:28:46.510
Brett Crane: And it recommends that I actually talk about the direct impact of the pain points from a numeric level as well, too. So, helps me get prepared internally as I deal strategize, you know, inside the calls when I’m working with prospects, as well as, you know, when I’m inside trying to

1219
03:28:46.510 –> 03:28:48.850
Brett Crane: Figure out the next steps and figure out the holes in my deal.

1220
03:28:49.200 –> 03:28:58.240
Brett Crane: Now, Ava’s doing other things in the background, too, and I’ll conclude here, Julie, in just a minute here. But, you know, one of the things she’s also doing is she’s developing these value cases in the background, too.

1221
03:28:58.330 –> 03:29:09.960
Brett Crane: So, this is oftentimes a very difficult step for reps to get to, because they have to work through the deal, has to be qualified, they get to the endpoint, and it’s this huge thing of work that you need to get an executive presentation together.

1222
03:29:09.960 –> 03:29:19.169
Brett Crane: A lot of our customers just simply say, okay, Ava’s got the training, she’s got the brain that puts all this stuff together. This isn’t what I would present, right? I’m not going to present this to an executive.

1223
03:29:19.170 –> 03:29:27.569
Brett Crane: But there are a lot of tools out there, like we use Gamma internally, where I can just paste all the content into, I can ask those tools to summarize them.

1224
03:29:27.580 –> 03:29:45.440
Brett Crane: I can even get my marketing-approved branding in those tools as well, too. And I just simply paste those, put those together, and, you know, Ava’s done all the… I’d call it, like, the grunt work for getting the difficult… we’ve had 50 conversations over the course of 6 months, how do we distill this down to a value case?

1225
03:29:45.440 –> 03:30:04.279
Brett Crane: Ava’s done all that for me, and then these tools are out there where you can simply take that content and produce and generate a presentation that you’ll probably have to work on the last mile and some of the, you know, some of the visuals, but at least you have something that doesn’t have you starting from scratch and thinking about, hey, what did we actually cover? Or even worse, it happens a lot in sales, is

1226
03:30:04.280 –> 03:30:08.750
Brett Crane: you copy the last best one that you did and try to retrofit it into the deal you’re working, so…

1227
03:30:08.750 –> 03:30:10.219
Brett Crane: Don’t have to do that here.

1228
03:30:10.430 –> 03:30:21.980
Brett Crane: The last piece I wanted to mention is that, you know, sellers also get to the finish line. They’ve had a really successful executive meeting, but then you get, like, the pesky, you know, legal, procurement, or less functional questions.

1229
03:30:21.980 –> 03:30:32.100
Brett Crane: Especially in SMB, you might not have the support of an SE team, for instance. In that case, I can actually do something like, hey, just answer the questions from the email, or if they send me, like, an attachment of questions.

1230
03:30:32.100 –> 03:30:40.169
Brett Crane: I can load that in too, and I can just ask Ava, hey, like, can you answer these questions for me? And then I can copy and paste that off. Off I go.

1231
03:30:40.170 –> 03:30:51.949
Brett Crane: From there, with her knowledge, answering those. So she’s churning through those right now. While she’s doing that, the one last thing I’ll end on here is that not only is this an annoying step, where we have to answer functional or legal or finance questions.

1232
03:30:51.950 –> 03:30:57.590
Brett Crane: At the end, the handoff tends to be pretty pesky for people to try to hand that off to their post-sales teams.

1233
03:30:57.590 –> 03:31:20.030
Brett Crane: And so, a lot of our customers are liking this, where they can see, hey, like, who are the stakeholders, what’s the plan that we discussed from an implementation phasing standpoint? Are there any risks that have been identified? Again, all this is being pulled together by Ava without your reps lifting a finger, so they’re able to do all those pesky last-minute, you know, last-mile deal things, as well as when the deal closes, to get the handoff smoothly to the post-sales team.

1234
03:31:20.370 –> 03:31:27.380
Brett Crane: So that’s it for the demo. Sorry if I rushed a little bit at the end, I got a little slowed down, I think, from the session before, but in recap.

1235
03:31:27.380 –> 03:31:41.980
Brett Crane: Ava has all the context and the training of your sellers, Ava has all the connections to the systems that they use every day on the go-to-market team, and helps with the work that happens in between, the point of, you know, getting your prospect on the phone and closing the deal and handing it off to the team on the back end.

1236
03:31:41.990 –> 03:32:00.939
Brett Crane: If you’re interested, I would say follow us on LinkedIn. We have, you know, things on YouTube as well, too, that are really strong, you know, sessions about what to do in the new AI-powered sales world. We also partnered with G2 recently. I’d recommend downloading the State of AI Tools in Sales, which will help you if you’re evaluating the tools to use in this market.

1237
03:32:00.940 –> 03:32:02.930
Brett Crane: And, if you’re really interested.

1238
03:32:02.930 –> 03:32:11.180
Brett Crane: Go to Vivin.com slash book. There’s a book button on the top right on our website, where you can actually just request a meeting, request a demo, and work directly with their team.

1239
03:32:11.730 –> 03:32:18.739
Julia Nimchinski: Thank you so much, Brad and Joseph. Thank you. And we are for, like, for a real treat today.