AIMinds #040 | Pallavi Gadepalli, Founder & CEO at Enterprise Chai

About this episode

Pallavi Gadepalli is the Founder and CEO of Enterprise Chai. With more than 20 years of experience in major tech companies, including eBay, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Cisco, she is a seasoned leader in product management and customer success. Pallavi has successfully built and scaled customer success practices, spearheaded innovative product development, and driven significant revenue growth, solidifying her reputation as an expert in her field.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Podcast addicts, Castbox. You can also watch this episode on YouTube.

In this episode of the AI Minds Podcast, hosted by Demetrios Brinkmann, we delve into the journey of Pallavi Gadepalli, founder of Enterprise Chai. She shares her transition from a disillusioned software developer at HP to a product manager at Microsoft and ultimately an entrepreneur focused on enhancing customer success through AI.

Enterprise Chai, named in honor of Pallavi's Indian heritage and her love for chai, empowers customer success teams by integrating with platforms like Zoom, Teams, and WebEx. It provides real-time data, analytics, and AI-driven suggestions to enhance customer engagement and retention. Pallavi discusses the challenges of disjointed product knowledge and sales commitments, explaining how Enterprise Chai offers instant access to vital information during customer interactions.

The podcast highlights how Enterprise Chai transforms customer success processes with strategic, data-driven insights for proactive engagement. Pallavi’s vision influences product development and business strategies, making it an essential tool for startups and enterprises looking to optimize customer success. The discussion underscores AI's potential to enhance the effectiveness of customer success teams across industries.

Fun Fact: The name "Enterprise Chai" is a clever play on words, associating 'chai' - a staple in Indian culture known for tea, with 'ChAI' which stands for conversational AI (Artificial Intelligence). It reflects a blend of cultural identity and tech innovation.

Show Notes:

00:00 Enterprise Chai: Killer name, unexpected coding journey.

03:20 Tired developer seeks impactful role or company.

07:48 Bureaucracy hinders product engagement and customer connection.

10:07 Learn product, evangelize, consult, ensure product fit.

12:56 Empower customers with immediate, accurate answers, repeatedly.

17:05 CIO bought product; user unfamiliar, needs guidance.

21:56 Developers prefer self-research before seeking help.

25:21 Targeting Series A/B companies, function agnostic solution.

26:08 Diversified customers led to deeper Zoom integration.

More Quotes from Pallavi Gadepalli:

Transcript:

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Welcome to the AI Minds Podcast. This is a podcast where we explore the companies of tomorrow being built AI First, I am your host, Demetrios, and this episode is brought to you by Deepram. The number one speech to text and text to speech API on the Internet today, trusted by the world's top conversational AI leaders, startups and enterprises like Spotify, Twilio, NASA and Citibank. Today we've got a very special episode talking all about Enterprise Chai, one of my favorite names we've had on here. What is the story behind that name? Can you break it down for us?

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Okay, I'm Indian. You can tell. I think you're. I'm Indian. And chai is religion. Okay, yes, it's definitely religion. I make my own masala. I make my own stuff in that I put in my chai, and I enjoy it every day.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

And that's inspiration, really. But it's a play on conversational AI or chat AI. So that's why it's called Chai. And it's for enterprises. So it was a very easy naving situation for us. We went with Enterprise Chai, we toyed with E Chai, E Dash Chai, but nothing seemed to cut it. It was Enterprise Chai.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

It was meant to be Echai makes me think that this is a product that came out in the late 1990s or early 2000s, like an eBay or Echad or something. So I'm glad you didn't go with that name. Enterprise Chai is an absolute killer name. But let's just, like, start a little bit before you had the inspiration to create Enterprise Chai, because I want to know all about your journey and really dig into a few of these pivotal moments that shaped your life. And one of these was that you did not want to be a software developer. Can you tell me more about what took you down that path and why you ultimately decided to get into learning how to code?

Pallavi Gadepalli:

You know, when I graduated from college, I wanted to be nothing but a software developer. I really wanted to be just be a software developer. And that was. That was after my master's degree. I wanted to be like a developer because I had such a great time in my university, and that was Loyola University in Chicago. And when I came to hp, I realized very quickly that HP is actually not a software company. It is a printer company. You know, and I was in the software division.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

You know, obviously we were trying to get there. We wanted to be a software company. But I'm also kind of a control freak. I shouldn't say that, but I am a control freak and I wanted to know where the direction of the product is going and how we are impacting the direction of the product. Right. How we were actually feeding into that direction, which is why the CEO thing is working really well for me. So. But very quickly I realized that business wasn't getting traction.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Like every year, whatever product I was on would get shut down and I would get moved divisions. Right. And then at that point I decided, oh, this is not the way to go for me. I don't want to be a developer where everything, all my sweat and hard work is just kind of code shut down and code given up, basically. So I decided that there were two options for me. One is to go to a company that. Where it's a software company or actually have a key input to the direction of product and the business, which I know I was naturally good at. Like all the business courses in engineering, the one or two business courses in engineering when I was in India, I just really excelled at them.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Yeah.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

So I decided I'm going to be a product manager. Microsoft gave me the opportunity. It was really, I think it was like universe. What I manifested out of the universe gave it back. Literally the day I was planning to quit HP and it was a hard decision for me because I was on a Visa, I got a call from Microsoft, like on the phone. It was the craziest thing. And she said, you know, hey, I'm Molly, I'm from Microsoft. We've been looking for this position for an era and we really need someone who's a developer who's going to come in, be a product manager.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

And things happened so quickly after that. I got hired into Microsoft as a product manager. They used to call it program manager at the time, but it was a product manager role. It was like defining the product and working with engineering.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Which product were you working on?

Pallavi Gadepalli:

It's not there anymore.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Oh, so even after all of this.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Even after all of this, it's not there anymore? No, it was called. We were working on a language called xaml and we were kind of at that time, like Microsoft is always ahead. It's like this low code way of building front end now. Low code is the big thing. Right. But that time, until 2006, it wasn't. And people couldn't really understand it. So I think it was.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

It was too early. Yeah, it was too early.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Yeah. Which happens. Yeah, it definitely happens sometimes. But you've had a very colorful career and you've been working at so many different Companies, these large enterprises, I'm sure you know the ins and outs of how the enterprises function. And then after being a product manager, I know you kind of defined a new role and I would love to hear about that and what brought you down that path.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Yeah, it's. And that's actually the inspiration for creating this company. So I'll go go into that a little bit. So when that role was created, which is called product success, it is not customer success, it is product success. And I'll explain the difference. So typically in enterprises there's a horizontal sales function which sells all products. They'll be specialists, of course, there are solutions engineers, but typically it's a horizontal function. And what ends up happening is product management is very removed from sales.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Product management doesn't know how the product was sold, what happened when the product was sold. And you really don't know what value was sold to the company, to the customer.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

I just got to stop you there because. Yes. Like what kind of backroom deals were made? Like, yeah, we can get that feature pushed through. Don't worry, it's on the roadmap. We'll bump it up because you're our favorite customers.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Yes. Commitments are made that don't pan out. Right?

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Yeah.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

So when that happens and the product is purchased, what sales typically will do is throw it over the wall and say, someone needs to manage this after. And what happens is support comes in too late. Right. Support is the last call for customers. So there's this in between phase where customers don't know what to do. And that happened at Cisco. When I was in that group in Cisco, they were struggling with getting adoption on their newest firewall. It was the latest and greatest firewall.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

It was the newest firewall and it was all shelfware. We realized that 90% of it was shelfware and nobody knew why. Because one, it's an on prem product. It's not cloud enabled. Right. Like it's just. There's a way to ping it, but there's no way to send information back. I mean, that's not, that was not in the LUA at all at that time, the license agreement.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

So when I came in, my job was to figure out why there is no adoption, what is leading to the lack of adoption and what's essentially happening. Right. So first step was telemetry. So then I had to work with the IT team to get telemetry. Then second step is if to get telemetry you have to change the lua. So I had to work with the lawyers to get the Lua changed. It was a big. It was a wonderful journey.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

It was great, actually. Yeah.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

And before you could do anything, you had to go through a lot of bureaucracy. At the end of the day, if I'm understanding this correctly, it sounds like it is a super needed function because there are products being pushed out, especially in these gigantic companies, and they're almost like released to crickets or they're released. You try and make a big fuss about it, but maybe sales isn't really connected with the accounts anymore. And so you have the customer success, but they're only there when there's problems. So these clients that you have aren't trying out the new latest and greatest because either they don't know about it or they don't know how to, or they're not really that interested. And maybe the product isn't for them, but you at least want them to go through the motion and see if it's for them.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Correct. Bingo. Because customer success is looked at as a reactive function. That is the precise reason why I started this company in the first place.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Yeah.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Because customer success is actually the MVP of the organization, Product success. And what happens is customer success folks are typically early in career they lose credibility because they are not product experts. You want to make them product experts because that's when they can see the weak signals of what the customer is trying to use, what they are not using, and actually give them a reason for using some product that you think is beneficial to them. But you need to be educated on it already. Like you need to be that person, consultative advisor to be telling them where they should go. And that advisory role comes from having experience with the product, experience in the industry and experience across customer base. Right. Because you want to know what the other customers are doing to tell them.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Maybe you can do this too. Right. So I did that in Cisco, I did that in ServiceNow. And I decided that with AI, you can actually bring this tribal knowledge into the system in real time. And that is our differentiator. We bring all this information in real time to any customer facing team. So they don't have to say something wrong. They don't have to lose credibility.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

They can actually have answers instantly. They don't want to wait on sales or product or support for that answer.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

So I want to get into the product and learn all about how it does that. But the thing that I think I'm interpreting is that you want to do more than just evangelize for the new product that comes out. Because it is, it's like part Evangelism but it's also part understanding. It's like sales engineer. I wouldn't call it sales engineer, but you have to understand. You have to be like a consultant in a way and understand the company and what they're trying to do and how the product would fit with what they're trying to do. And then on the other side, yeah, you want to know what others are doing and. And hopefully there's some crossover that people could.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Could see. But. But the other thing that I'm thinking is you have to understand the product and then understand where the product is going. So the deep knowledge of product takes you a little bit out of that evangelism bucket. It's like there's a. There's a Venn diagram that I'm seeing in my head of evangelism, product, sales engineer, all of that type of stuff.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

You're correct. So the Venn diagram that you're seeing is product expertise, customer context expertise, and industry expertise. And those are the three things. Those are the three pieces that I'm bringing to this tool in real time.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

I see. So let's. Let's talk a little bit more about, like, what gave you the idea to create this besides, you saw that, hey, I'm having an impact now. I imagine when you're at ServiceNow and you're at Cisco and you see this role that you essentially created or they created for you, you blazed your own path. You saw that now you're having an impact. Whereas before, maybe in product or as a dev, it felt like you weren't having as much of an impact. What made you say, like, wow, maybe we could productize this?

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Yeah, very good question. So I saw that the not being able to detect these weak signals on renewals or customer dissatisfaction, or not giving them the answers immediately, kind of. We lost the customer already, right? Like in a call, if customer asked you a question, oh, let me get back to you. When you get back to them, they were not viewing emails. They were not even viewing the videos or the literature we were sending them. It just doesn't happen, actually. So that's why digital touch is still evolving. It's not working, right? It's actually not working.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

So what I wanted to change was while in call, I should be able to give the customer the right answer. So they walk away feeling like they got the answer to the question that they wanted, but also feel empowered to make further decisions on top of it. That's number one. Number two is when you do that, the customer will come back to you over and over. Again, because they're getting answers immediately. They will call you and tell you, hey, I had this issue and I really want to try out this product. Like, why am I not able to do this? What does it actually do? And sometimes it's just for their knowledge. They want immediate knowledge, they want knowledge kind of on demand, really, so they can share with their team, they can share with their superiors.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

To be honest with you, everyone has one goal. Right. They want to be successful in their role.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Yeah.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

That's the whole point. Like you want to make them successful in their role also. And you want, frankly, by being a product expert and an industry expert, you are paving your own career path. You are upgrading your own career path.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Yeah.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

So I thought it was a crazy, amazing win win situation that AI actually enables you to get to. Right. AI is democratizing knowledge. It's making you an expert instantly by giving you the answers. Why not make it even better? Like why not? Why do you have to type in anything? Why do you have to ask for it? It should be delivered to you automatically. And that was the idea I got, and that was the idea I went after. And when I started OpenAI didn't even have real time streaming. Right.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

They just released it just now. I started it in January because I knew that this is going to be the next phase, this is going to be the next big thing.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Yeah. So there's so many questions I have about the product itself. I think if I'm gathering, the way that it works is you have a buddy on a call with you that is recording the call or streaming the call to a knowledge base. And then when questions come up, maybe they're suggesting answers and it's, it's almost like you have that, that buddy that is telling you, oh, maybe this is what you're looking for, or maybe this is the answer to that question. And they're telling the customer success rep or they're telling everyone in the chat, what does that look like?

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Yeah, so it is. We have typically, let me walk you through the flow. So we have integrated with Zoom teams, WebEx and GMeet. That's who we've integrated with. So every time a CSM gets on a call with a customer, let's say in this situation, I am the CSM or customer facing role, whatever that might be, you are the customer. While I'm chatting with you, we are detecting in the background if the customer is asking a question. So there's a question detection piece. Is this a question? Is this in context of the product? Is this in context of the industry.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

And then we figure out what the right answer is. It could be this or it could be this and stuff like that. And we give it in the shortest form possible, in the deepest form possible. And it's like a teleprompter for me, the csf. So I will see it surfacing. Answers to me, say this to the customer. Now, next level of questioning should be this. That's what I'm building.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Oh, so cool. So you're not trying to solve the problem of the awareness or getting customers to use products. It's more the idea of the customers are using the products and they're trying to figure out, hey, could I do this or could I do that? Or I'm. I'm using this product. Is there anything else that I should know? And then you say, oh, yeah, actually, we've got two other products you probably should be using with it.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

So both customer success is a journey. So you're managing the journey from 0 to 1 to help the customer get there. So it's phased, basically. Right. So we have also created these phased frameworks in our tool, which. In which the onboarding call is essentially, they're not even using the product. They just bought the product. They don't even know what the product is about because what was sold is something else.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

And it was sold to the cio. And the person who's using the product is someone completely different. Right. So when they come to the call, they're like, I don't know why we bought the product. Can you just, like, walk me through what this product actually does? And what do you provide us for value? What should I be looking out for? What can I report back to my. To my higher ups in six months, three months, two months? So customer success managers do everything. They start from zero to one. So we do everything.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

The customer comes to the table and they say, we don't know what to do with this product. To you know What, I'm an M3 customer. I'm this power user and I need this specific thing. So it can be all or none of the above. And we have that phased approach. So we. When you get into the call, you can choose where the customer is at. Are they in the onboarding phase? Are they in the escalation phase? Are they in renewal phase? And based on that, we tailor the questions also.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

That's actually a way to tailor our questions, and that's a way to build a customer blueprint. And that's the customer context that I talked about earlier. So as you're going through the phases, you're building a customer blueprint and then over time we can do amazing analytics on multiple customer blueprints and then you can verticalize it and analyze it and say, oh, for this vertical, the customers use this kind of product and they got to maturity level one in six months versus nine months versus 12 months. Right.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

That's where the product piece comes in.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Yes, correct, correct. This is just like we are just scratching the surface by conversations. The analytics piece is where you can tell how did the customer progress, what do they want next? Is there a renewal risk? Is there an upsell opportunity? Those type of things come in with each conversation based on how the customer progressed through the journey. We have built everything.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Are you also plugging in the usage like the telemetry usage?

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Yeah, we have to integrate with the CRM to get the usage.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Yeah.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

And we are not doing that yet because we are a startup, we are an early stage startup. So we want pilot customers to come on board and say we want you to integrate with Salesforce or pipedrive or whatever the case may be. And we'll absolutely do that. We have the ability to do that and obviously it's on our roadmap, but we want a customer to come and say we want this conclusively for us to be able to build it.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

HubSpot Monday. Whatever, you know.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Yeah, whatever they need. But that is like you said, you are getting a much better picture because you are taking the customer success feedback and triaging it with not just like oh, I had a problem here, but more here's what I'm using or here's what I'm doing. And can we see if there are certain types of use cases that are using the product more? Can we see? It's, it's like surfacing all of these unknowns and you get to ask a few questions about your users that maybe it would be a lot harder to figure out or you would need to hire a data analyst or a data scientist to really dig into the data.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

If you really think about it, every year people hire BCG or other management consultants for 300 or $600 an hour to do a project just for this. Yeah, you don't need to do this anymore. You can record everything you can give them, not just make your customer success. Managers like superstars and Frankly not just CSMs but sales engineers. Sales, anybody really superstars because they get real time answers. But on top of it, there's two things that are missed really, which is some CSMs or some sales engineers are better than the others. I mean that's just the reality. Right? And that tribal knowledge is missing.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

It's in their head. So when you capture all this, you can make everyone, you can democratize that knowledge. You can make everyone superstars. So can you imagine if you had like 10 superstars instead of three, how well that would pan out? Like 10 superstars instead of three, how well that would pan out for your organization? You can handle more customers with just those ten superstars, right? So that's number one, you're democratizing knowledge. You are building knowledge bases. You don't even have to write your own knowledge base now you're building knowledge base already with your conversation. Right. You're building knowledge base, you're building analytics, you're building high level approaches to what to even position to your customers next year.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

It's it, it, the, the opportunity is limitless. Like I, I'm so bullish on this product because it's, the opportunity is really limitless on this.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Yeah.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

And especially if you can consider, I've seen it. And especially if you tie in sales to customer success, to support to professional services, can you imagine like the information flow that goes end to end like you can become a beast.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

I see in my own life how many times you'll get developers that will try to do something and it's almost a last resort to get on a call with someone because I would prefer to look at the docs and be able to figure it out on my own and just go through the docs and then okay, cool, I sorted myself out. Oh, I can't figure it out. Well, now I'm going to go into a community and I'm going to ask a question in Slack. Oh, now I still can't figure it out or whatever. I'm going to go to Stack Overflow and search there, blah blah, blah. And as a last resort I'm going to go and get on a call and say like, hey this, this isn't working, like I couldn't find it in the docs. And maybe I'll just say that off, you know, very nonchalant. And if you are able to surface that from five or 10 customers, that probably means you should be redoing your docs.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Because if a few customers are saying yeah, I tried to find it the docs, I couldn't figure out how to do it from the docs. It's like, oh, maybe we need to do an overhaul on our docs pretty much.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

And that's exactly where we are going. So we actually flag It. So let's say our system can't find it. Like while in conversation, our system can't find the answer for the CSM to provide to the customer or if the customer is saying that I couldn't find it, we actually flag that and we say, hey, we found that we didn't, we couldn't find the answer. Either it's an image that we couldn't understand or the answer doesn't exist. And you might want to upgrade your documentation. And here's how you would upgrade it. Here's the question that you will need to answer to upgrade your documentation.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Wow.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

So we are doing that right now.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

How cool is that? Oh, that is so good. Last thing on those flags because that feels like a very powerful feature. Are you also seeing flags of five people have had this same question or 10? You know, there's, there's, this is a repeat question that tends to come up. Is that also getting flagged?

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Yes, that is. So what we do is every conversation results in a new FAQ document. Okay. And at some point every month or so or every 15 days and it depends, we haven't figured out the cadence just yet. Again, early stage startup, what we are going to do is we are going to dedupit and create one document.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Sure.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

So which means that you're going to track the counter, you're going to tab the counter for similar or same question and you're going to say this question was asked 15 times and this is the answer that should be given. And we are even merging like what the LLM gives us and what the CSM or sales engineer is answering and we merge it. We actually do a diff of it and merge it and then give the best answer of the two.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Fascinating. Well, this is very exciting and I can see how you will be powering up teams across and it feels like this is a tool that can be used for gigantic enterprises, but also startups that are scaling and scaling quickly and need help. So have you seen certain verticals or not verticals, certain size of companies enjoy this more or is it right now pretty open?

Pallavi Gadepalli:

It's pretty open. So I was actually, I thought like you, which is, you know, I should go really after large enterprises and you know, some of the enterprises we were discussions with were Fortune 100 companies and but we also know that sales cycles for Fortune 100 companies are incredibly long and we wouldn't be alive if we were, if we were going after them very realistically. So our customers are series A, series B companies right now, still early again and they are finding use from it because they have seen the potential. They are saying that we can use it across the board, we can use it for sales, we can use it for success. You can use it for professional services. Really, it's a function agnostic. And it's better because if it's function agnostic, you can actually see the trends more clearly. Right.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

So unfortunately, or fortunately, we have seen no vertical. Really, all four or five of our customers are completely different verticals. I have a cybersecurity background, so I was hoping to go after the cybersecurity market, but that didn't pan out either, which is odd, but that's just how things go. You cannot even predict how customers will use your tool. So that's where we are at. There was a big thing from our customers, which is, for enterprises, integrating with Zoom is very important. So at this point, we have now deeply integrated with Zoom. So the web Zoom, of course, works now as we speak, because it's a web extension listener, but now we have integrated deeply with Zoom as well.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

So when you start a Zoom meeting automatically, our tool will start just like a bot, you know.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Nice. Oh, that's great. Yeah. It does feel like every Series A and Series B startup that I've worked at, the support team, was getting crushed.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Yes.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Just absolutely crushed.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

So, yes, correct.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

It makes sense that you're finding a bit of traction there. I could see that.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Yeah. And if you have other customers to recommend, please find us. Join us.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

Yeah. So is it. It's enterprisechai.com.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Yes. And I will say this, our website doesn't look very good. Again, early stage, we are focused. We are engineers, we are focused on functionality and we are focused on how well and how accurately we deliver responses. We have not focused on the website, but we are trying.

Demetrios Brinkmann:

It almost gives me more confidence that you've been building the product, you've been shipping the product and not worrying about these supervolous things like a website.

Pallavi Gadepalli:

Yes, unfortunately, that's the case. We are working on it, though. Hopefully we'll release it soon.