Closing the Loop
With Andrew CamelatOpenView

A series of interviews on

the mechanics of business and real-world applications of machine intelligence

CTL is a series of interviews with executives at the largest global businesses. We go behind the scenes, understand how these businesses operate, and explore the most interesting applications of AI.

We have a strict no-buzzwords, no hand-waving policy. It's about near-term tactical ROI, and how we get there.

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Democratizing complex software
With Karl Mosgofian, CIO of Gainsight

Key Takeaways

Customers churn from software products due to lack of value. Even if the product is valuable, it doesn't matter if users don't know how to use it. Software vendors train 30 users at start, only 2 know how to use it after a year. Large language models bring value to the other 28.

Topics Covered

  • What is Gainsight & who is Karl

    • Gainsight is the leading provider of customer success software; Vista purchased the business in 2020 for $1.1 billion
    • Karl leads IT & cybersecurity, overseeing an organization of 50 people of the 1300 total

  • Automation in Karl's organization of IT & cybersecurity

    • Automation has largely been a false promise as a CISO in the past; most vendors generate more alerts, don't help remediate
    • It now seems synthesis and decision-making is possible; Karl is particularly interested in tools that can synthesize the large volume of threat intelligence data for his team

  • First thing Gainsight implemented with OpenAI

    • Summarization of key takeaways based on data Gainsight has gathered; last year, if an executive were going to a meeting, a user of the Gainsight product would need to manually summarize Gainsight's data; this feature now does it automatically

  • The power of conversational interfaces in software products

    • Gainsight recently gave an internal demo of a conversational interface to their existing journey builder; users would previously use the drag and drop interface to build user journeys
      • Now they can describe in natural language how they want to build a journey, and the system will handle it correctly
    • Opened Karl's mind up to the potential for this in other products
      • People in technology forget how challenging it is for most people to interface with software
      • It's so common that you (as a vendor or buyer) are training 30 people when you by a product, and then a year later only 2 people know how to use it
      • Think about the impact it would have on retention if more of these people still knew how to use the product
    • BI is the first market Karl's thinks of with this idea
      • So much of BI is just asking and answering questions; enabling users to do this in real-time would be very powerful, vs generating static reports and iterating over long periods of time

  • The speed, scale, and focus of Gainsight's response to LLM growth

    • The company formed a large team internally to act on the opportunity here, primarily as it relates to product strategy
    • As part of this effort, Karl stood up a "center of excellence" to guide the internal teams working with OpenAI to use their dedicated OpenAI deployment on Azure; this was critical from his perspective to manage risks associated with people using ChatGPT and the generic OpenAI API

Highest ROI Product

  • Security Questionaire Tool