Yuriy Zaremba Of AiSDR Is Disrupting Our Industry, and What We Can Do About It

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

I think there are a couple of things. First of all, we are Ukrainians and we started this company in the middle of the full scale war with Russia. Our offices and team are in Ukraine. Secondly, both me and my co-founder and brother Oleg are second-time founders. We have built and sold one company before — AXDRAFT. Thirdly, both of our companies have been backed by Y Combinator, which is the most famed accelerator in the world. All of these things are unique and there are only a handful of companies and founders that accomplished something similar.

From a product perspective, what sets AiSDR apart is the level of detail we go into when configuring customer’s AI persona. We even configure specific words to use and to avoid to make sure our AI captures customer’s tone of voice and value proposition just right. Another thing that distinguishes us is the level of personalization — we take into account the entire Linkedin profile of a person, including the most recent posts to try to find the one thing that may connect that person’s needs and interests to our customer’s value proposition to make our outreach relevant.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

For me those three character traits are: grit, optimism and adaptability.

When you are building a startup nothing ever goes exactly your way, so very often you have to move forward solely relying on grit and discipline, being optimistic about the future and ready to change to make that future happen. Those are the skills that get you through the toughest times. I’ve lived through this countless times, when large customers where churning, or funds were running out, or when we were hearing consistent “no” from investors. We did not give up, we powered through and adapted, believing that this just one hiccup on our long road to success and it turned out that way.

Let’s now move to the main point of our discussion about AI. Can you explain how AI is disrupting your industry? Is this disruption hurting or helping your bottom line?

In our case, we are the AI disruptor. Previously the sales outreach process looked like this: a sales representative (1) builds a lead list; (2) creates a standardized email sequence in Outreach or similar software; (3) launches automated sequence and engages manually with people who respond with a goal to book meeting. If a sales representative wanted to personalize an email to get higher engagement/conversion — they would have to research the prospect’s account and craft an email manually that would take 15–30 minutes per email. Once the meeting was booked — it was passed down to an account executive.

AI completely removes the human from this process up until a point of when a call is booked. AI can search for relevant leads, based on a provided set of parameters, create a personalized email for every single prospect (no templated sequences) and when prospects respond — correspond with them, answering follow-up questions and handling objections. Honestly, it is pretty mind blowing to what extent the sales representative function can be automated with AI

Which specific AI technology has had the most significant impact on your industry?

I think it is without the doubt — GPT-4, a model behind ChatGPT. We are also use Claude by Anthropic and the most recent model — Claude 3 Opus is awesome, but definitely GPT-4 is the technology that started all this and showed us what’s possible

Can you share a pivotal moment when you recognized the profound impact AI would have on your sector?

Yes, I read in an article that AI convinced a person to pass CAPTCHA test for it, pretending to be a blind person. It amazed me and I thought — if AI can convince a person to do this it surely must be able to write convincing sales emails. That’s when I started experimenting with ChatGPT and GPT-4 and when I saw the first results — I was blown away. That’s when I knew that the future of sales is here.

How are you preparing your workforce for the integration of AI, and what skills do you believe will be most valuable in an AI-enhanced future?

That’s a great question. First of all, we build AI into all our processes from day one. We use AI-assistants in customer support, marketing, sales and software engineering. We made it part of our culture.

In terms of skills, I think that understanding what AI can and cannot do and being able to prompt it properly to get the desired results is going to be a key skill. Being open and curious about the use of AI in your work generally is also very important. It’s inevitable and avoiding it won’t change the outcome.

What are the biggest challenges in upskilling your workforce for an AI-centric future?

For me the number one challenge is finding work and purpose for people, whose jobs will be directly impacted and replaced by AI. In my opinion, letting people go is not a viable option. In case of AiSDR our vision is to enable sales representatives to become account executives, so essentially get promoted, while AI does more mundane work. In customer success or marketing roles, people can focus on quality assurance, AI configuration and monitoring and similar processes. Thinking through this change, communicating this vision with your team, and educating them to enable their transition into these new roles is where we should focus our efforts.

What ethical considerations does AI introduce into your industry, and how are you tackling these concerns?

On a product level, the question that I get asked most often is: “what if AI says something bad/stupid/insulting, that will damage our brand reputation?”. My answer is always the same: there are many controls in place to prevent this: (1) we use the latest models that have multiple guardrails and protections built into them during training; (2) we run them on “low temperatures”, which means that AI follows instructions more closely, vs. being more creative; (3) we have prompt infrastructure in place that explains to AI what a good sales outreach looks like, what to do and what to avoid; (4) we allow customers to create robust rules, specific only to them as to what AI should and should not say and finally (5) we ask AI to check every AI-generated email for quality before it goes out. Every AI company has similar processes in place, to make sure nothing bad happens.

On people level, as I discussed above — our vision is to delegate routine tasks to AI, allowing people to focus of higher value added work.