In this episode of GTM Innovators, host Kyle James sits down with Jon White, SVP of Product at Crayon, to explore how AI is reshaping the world of competitive intelligence. Jon shares how Crayon is helping go-to-market teams move beyond manual research and outdated battle cards by harnessing AI to surface real-time insights, identify emerging competitors, and enable sales teams with smarter, more strategic content. From parsing call transcripts to tracking digital footprints, Jon walks us through the evolving tech stack for modern competitive enablement—and what’s coming next. Whether you’re in sales, product, or marketing, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.
Jon’s Recent LinkedIn Post Referenced in the Show
Referenced GTM in the AI ERA Webinar
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Transcript:
Kyle James 00:00
Kyle, Kyle, hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of GTM Innovators by 3Sixty Insights. I’m your host, Kyle James, and today we’re going to dive into Gosh, kind of a whole interesting conversation, talking about how AI is streamlining competitive intelligence. And to do that, I’ve got Jon White, who is joining the conversation here with me. John is the Senior Vice President of Product and crayon Jon. Welcome. Welcome to the show.
Jon White 00:33
Cool. Thank you very much for having me. Very excited to be here, yeah, super excited to talk to you, and just to kind of start the conversation, you posted something a few weeks ago, gosh, maybe even a month now, about some of the cool stuff that y’all are doing at crayon, some of some of the really fascinating new features. And your CEO, founder, Jonah open, who was my first boss at HubSpot, way back in the day. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, that’s how we kind of connect. Kind of was pretty excited and sharing. And it’s like, Oh, this looks really interesting. How y’all are thinking about it, and how you’re tying AI into doing something with, you know, always isn’t an obvious thing to do, but it takes a lot of work to do, to do research on competitors and stay up to beat and with them. And, you know, before we really dive into some of that, I just love to, like, you know, hear a little bit of your origin story. I’m a big comic book guy, but you’ve got an interesting history, like starting at Moz and going to high spot and crayon and some other stops in between. So just, kind of, you know, tell the audience here a little bit more about you and kind of how that led you into, kind of what you guys are doing now with kind of competitive research. Yeah, I can. I can give you my, my, my superhero origin story. It’s not going to be quite as exciting as the comic books. But yeah, so I’m John. I’m in Seattle, Washington. I grew up in the UK. I moved out here about 20 years ago, and I’m currently the head of product for crown. I’ve been working in product management. Now for about 15 years. I was an engineer. Before that, I moved into product management because I kind of realized I was more interested in, you know, what we were building for the customer and why we were building it, as opposed to actually building the products. You know, I was, I was the the engineer that was always, you know, asked to go along on the sales meeting and talk to the customers, which I really enjoyed. Let
Kyle James 02:27
me get on the customer interview so I can think about why I’m building this instead of PAL,
Jon White 02:31
right? Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, I found my, my kind of calling and product management, and now I’ve been working in sort of go to market. Tech go to market. PM, for about 10 of those 15 years with with Mars and with high spot for four years with company called Catalyst, and I joined crayon about a year ago, mostly because I really felt like the and we obviously we’re going to get into this, like the competitive enablement space is just ripe for kind of reinvention, for using, using AI technology. So that was really exciting. I met Jonah. Jonah, Jonah and I clicked. Like, the first time we talked, we had a lot of the same ideas. And, yeah, I’ve been, I’ve been deep in that world. For the last year, it’s been really fun,
Kyle James 03:22
nice. So let’s talk about that, because I kind of tease it and you kind of tease it, so let’s, let’s jump right into it. Right like competitive research takes a ton of work, because you’ve got to decide who all your competitors are, and then do research into their websites and see what they’re doing and see what they’re putting out there. And it’s manual and takes a ton of time, but what you guys are kind of doing, like it to your point, it’s primed for kind of AI disruption. So talk to me, kind of how y’all are thinking about that, and how y’all are doing it, what you’re seeing out there, and, yeah, let’s just see where it takes us.
Jon White 03:53
Yeah, I think it’s probably best to start with, with, like competitive enablement itself. So I think, okay, there are some pretty wild statistics out there. So about two thirds of most companies, about two thirds of their opportunities, of their deals, are competitive, okay? And competitive deals actually close at a way higher rate than non competitive deals, because, you know, if your customer is out there assessing you versus other platforms. Obviously, they’re pretty serious. They’re putting effort into trying to buy your product. Um, but if you are, and you should do this, you should go and ask your friends in sales, or you should go and ask anyone you know who’s in like a CRO or a VP of sales role, how well equipped they feel they are. Their team is to sell against competitors. And most people tell you they’re not equipped. In fact, there’s a Gartner study where competitive enablement ranked the lowest out of a bunch of different kind of sales practices and disciplines. Sales leaders rated themselves like two out of five in terms of how prepared they are to sell against their competitors. So then you kind of you’ve got to ask yourself, why is that? Why. Is this like such an opportunity? It’s so important that sales reps are able to, you know, answer objections and land differentiators and essentially win more deals, but most companies just aren’t that good at it. Yeah, and I think it comes down to what you just said. I think that traditional competitive enablement is very, very manual work. You have, first, you have to collect all of the data. And by the way, some of our customers have 1000 data we our product collects 1000 data points a day. For some of our customers, like literally 1000 pieces of data a day. Then you have to organize that. You have to synthesize it. You have to find the 5% of that that actually could help one someone on your sales team win a deal. Then you have to take that. You actually have to write it down in a way that works for sales reps, like in their language. Then you have to publish it, then you have to communicate it to the sales team. It’s just a lot of work, and it requires a very, a very specific skill set and and the result of it is that unless you have product to help you do that, it’s very, very difficult to do manually. And that’s kind of, that’s kind of where, where we come in, like we are reinventing that workflow all the way from aggregating the data to organizing it, to publishing it, to enabling your team to updating the content. We are transforming that using this, you know, new gift of technology that we’ve been given, which is generative. Ai, that’s
Kyle James 06:26
cool, it it’s fascinating when you think about it, right? Like, traditionally enough, I’m kind of more of a product person myself, but I spent some time in sales funnels and being a sales engineer and whatnot, for for reps. But really the only time they get that intelligence historically, is when they ran up against that competitor in a sales conversation. And to your point, like it makes sense, like those competitive ones are the ones that are the most likely to close. It’s just, are they going to close with you or them, right? And so you tease some of that stuff out, but, but what also is really interesting is we’ll just pick on CRMs for a minute, because everybody knows what a CRM is. They all do 95% of the same stuff. Let’s be honest. It’s it’s that edge stuff that you have to know what it is and how you differentiate yourself from that other one if you’re also selling that, and when you’re dealing with potentially dozens or hundreds of those kind of competitors and all these different things, it’s the devil in the details, right? And who has time for that?
Jon White 07:23
Absolutely, yeah. And I think what, what you find in most companies happens is you’ve got somebody, or you have a team who is responsible for competitive enablement, and that team will, you know, do all the things you’re supposed to do, which is, you know, competitive messaging, competitive positioning, you know, customer facing assets, sales training. You’d have like the official, the official competitive strategy, but then you also have, like the unofficial stuff. That is what the reps actually do on the course. And I think in good companies, you know, the the official enablement channels are, they’re speaking the reps language. They’re they’re, you know, they’re finding talk tracks for reps to use, our landing with customers. But also, reps are very resourceful, like, I think you have a number on your head and you have to hit a certain revenue target every quarter. You’re going to do what you need to do to close a deal, regardless of whether you know, you read it in a battle card or not. So a lot of what we’ve been working on over the last year is, how can we support kind of like the official enablement channels, which is what our product has been doing for a long time anyway. Also, how can we kind of tap into the things that reps are doing organically, by analyzing calls, analyzing Slack channels, looking at win loss interviews, and see if we can combine those together to create more effective enablement.
Kyle James 08:44
That’s That’s smart, like, and it feels like all the different people I talked to about AI, right, like call, recordings, transcripts, things like that. That’s the low hanging fruit when it comes to AI. You could just feed it all of this volume of data that it could it could parse and pick out what are the interesting nuggets here? Everybody knows the call summaries they get now, right? But there’s so much more you can do with that data. And it sounds like y’all are just picking it up for this specific element in such a useful and practical way.
Jon White 09:13
Yeah, I think the call summaries are great. The call summaries are very deal specific. You know, for example, one feature of our product is we integrate with Gong. We integrate with their APIs. Fantastic APIs, by the way. They’re a great product to integrate with. But while Gong’s call summaries are very useful if you’re a sales manager and you’re trying to understand what happened on the call, what we’re using the AI to do is look across all of your calls, across all of your accounts. Tell me. Tell me, trends that are happening with competitors. You know, typically that might show up as our competitor has launched a new feature. This is how it’s being positioned. You know, this is how it’s showing up as an objection on a sales call to our reps, and then feeding that Intel back into the marketing team so they can respond. And again, a rep is not, you know, if you’re if. A rep on a call and you’re selling, and you get a competitive objection, you’re not going to ever say, You know what? That’s a really good question. I’m going to wait until somebody on my marketing team answers that for me, and then I’m going to give you my answer. You’re just going to, like, say what you need to say in the moment, and they’re doing it. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So we’ve also been using those call transcripts to kind of pull out the organic things that reps are coming up with, and feeding that back into the marketing team.
Kyle James 10:26
Yeah, yeah. I imagine too, like you’ve just got my head spinning here, that having all of those call transcripts, you probably also are able to identify, like competitors and competition that people never even thought of before. That probably happens all the time for companies, doesn’t it? Or maybe somebody thought of it, but they it first time they heard it’s on a sales rep, and you’re, yeah, asking the sales rep to put it up the, you know, the Yeah,
Jon White 10:48
absolutely, absolutely. I think that often the first time, I mean, we’ve all seen it, like in the Slack channel, like someone will say, Hey, has anyone ever heard of Acme? You know, X account is evaluating them. Are they competitive? To us, nine times out of 10 that is happening in a customer call. So actually, one of the features of crayon is we can, we can identify those competitors when they come up on calls and actually drop them into your into your insights.
Kyle James 11:13
Well, now I’m curious, like, what is how many competitors in normal does an average B to B, company, B to B, SAS company have like because there’s so many edge cases, and people use things so differently. It’s probably not dozens, it’s what, probably not 10s. It’s probably dozens, right? It
Jon White 11:32
really varies. I think it depends a lot on how many products you sell. I think that we think about it more in terms of how many products or how many go to market motion. So you worked at HubSpot? Yeah, HubSpot, how many? How many products does HubSpot have today? 320, different prices. So if you went through all of those different products, there’s probably, like five or six tier one competitors each. There’s probably a bit of overlap. So HubSpot probably has 150 competitors All in all, yeah, most companies don’t have that many products, but I would say, on average, most companies probably care about three to five competitors per kind of product line or per GTM motion. That’s crazy about average. And then obviously, you know, another thing that AI has enabled, which I think is great, by the way, is it’s now even cheaper than it was, say, two years ago, to start a company. So there’s tons of these, like niche AI companies popping up that just do list, like one small thing that might compete with you. And, you know, maybe they don’t end up growing up into a into a full business. Maybe they end up, you know, getting acquired or whatever. But what we’re seeing is, there’s, we call them ankle biters. There’s lots of like, ankle biter type startups that are very early, that our customers are seeing. And you care about tracking those two maybe it’s just like you put that company in the category of, like, pretty cool technology, and they might be important in the future. So I’d say most companies are probably tracking like five or 10 of those, those smaller organizations as well, wow. Well, there’s a lot, there’s lot, a lot of companies out there, yeah,
Kyle James 13:08
and they’re new popping up all the time, like you said, so God, there’s some. There’s a couple different directions we could go. Like, I don’t want to go there yet, because right, like, Where does this go? Right? Like, I think we kind of get more towards, like, the Where do you see AI coming in the next 612, months, but like, what are you doing right now? Besides, you know, reading some of this stuff, kind of what y’all are doing with creating, streamlining the battle card reports, and putting some of that stuff and putting more content. Like, how do you have success stories or customers are telling you, like, how they’re actually using this stuff in real time? That has been just mind blowing.
Jon White 13:49
Yeah, I think the so if, if we think back to the the kind of the flow I outlined at the beginning, so you’ve got to get all the data in one place, you’ve got to organize it, find the useful stuff, then you have to publish it. That’s basically the and then you got to keep it up to date. That’s kind of like the the flywheel of enablement. And we, we kind of had to ask ourselves, like, where do we start? Because there’s like, dozens of opportunities to improve every single part of that flow using this new technology. And where we decided to start was kind of the data analysis, okay? And the reason is, you know, some of our customers get 1000 data points a day. And I even if you had a team of two or three people dedicated to competitive intelligence, which most companies don’t, they just don’t, you know, that’s a lot of data to crunch. So where we started was building product capability that basically allows you to do things like, you know, take all of my g2 crowd reviews, take all of my cool recordings, take the deals I’ve won and lost in the last week. Combine all those together, run analysis of them and tell me what my, you know, strengths and weaknesses are versus this competitor. That’s something that I. You know, if you did three years ago, and I used to, I to do this stuff, I’d be sitting there with like, 100 sticky notes all over my whiteboard. And, you know, it’s all very manual analysis, and now you can kind of do that stuff in a matter of seconds, which is mind blowing. And the reason we started there is because if you can’t get that bit right, then you don’t know what to write the content about. You don’t know what to build the training about. You don’t know what to put in the battle card. Put in the battle card, because you haven’t crunched the data. So we started there, and this is not, you know, maybe I’m a bit biased, but this is not hyperbole. I would say this has been the most successful feature set I’ve ever worked on in my career, in terms of, like, you know, pull from customers, like demand adoption, you know, we’ve got, we call it sparks. We’ve got customers who, you know, created hundreds and hundreds of these analyzes in the short amount of time that we’ve had it out. So, yeah, and it’s so straightforward to do, and it’s, you know, it’s a great example of how, you know, you can take new technology that’s available, and AI really has been a gift to tech companies. It’s really allowed us to solve problems that were unsolvable before and just really help customers.
Kyle James 16:11
You said something that is fascinating to me is kind of also a product mind. Like, yeah, traditionally, we think of this competitive intelligence being used for sales people, but like, why can’t it be used for product people? Why couldn’t it be used for customer success? People that are, like, trying to save a churn or something like, do you see that happening? Like, more and more of these go to market, you know, customer facing functions, or being able to take advantage of this and using it in new and innovative ways
Jon White 16:36
too? Yeah, 100% I mean, I’d say the first thing is the line between traditional like, let’s think of your traditional sales rep is like an account executive. The line between that and other customer facing roles, I think, is like, more blurry than ever, in a good way. So, like, you know, whereas we you could call it sales enablement or revenue enablement, I think, you know, you think of all the different roles now that you’re enabling is sales, it’s customer success, it’s account management, it’s business development, sales engineering. Basically anybody who talks to a customer benefits from having competitive enablement, because every single one of those people is having conversations about their competitors, right? So I think when we think about sales roles. We’re thinking about CS in that same kind of market. Now, the other side of the coin is, you know, obviously I am a product person. I care deeply about what my competitors are doing, because I want to help my sales people, you know, have a better product to sell. So there’s also the strategic side of competitive intelligence. And you know, many of our customers are feeding data into their product teams, into their marketing teams, you know, into their leadership teams. Turns out, you know, CEOs care a lot about what the competitors are doing as well. Now, I think it’s a slightly different type of content, like you don’t, you’re not. You know, as a product manager, I don’t need a battle card, right? I don’t know what to say to a customer on a call. What I need to know is x competitor has just launched this feature. This is what my customers are saying about it. So it’s a slightly different kind of channel, but equally as important, and maybe in the long term, that’s more important, because that’s helping, you know, me, build a better product. It’s helping my marketing team build better messaging. It’s helping you know Jonah, come up with, you know, more effective company strategies. Yeah,
Kyle James 18:31
helping you decide what to build. Because this is what people are talking about. What is the pain of this thing’s addressing? Do we have something that addresses that and need to market and position it a new way? But yeah, it’s, it’s, it is something for everybody, and not like, I get why it starts in the sales, because everybody thinks the sales money, blah, blah, blah. But, like, yeah, it feeds into all these other part of the org too. And if you’re lowering the barrier entry to get it, like, I’m sure there’s a lot of demand coming towards it. Yeah,
Jon White 18:59
I think as well. One of the reasons it hits sales first is because sales is often the first team that has to deal with it. So let’s think of like a classic example. So maybe when you know when you were HubSpot, I didn’t say, Did you work on the CRM product?
Kyle James 19:12
There was I was there before. CRM, you were there before. Okay,
Jon White 19:15
so let’s use CRM. So Salesforce announces like they do their like, spring release, or whatever. What’s the first thing that happens when a major competitor announces a bunch of feature stuff, the sales team panics, yeah, right. We’ve all seen it. So someone puts a, you know, puts a blog post in the compete channel, in Slack, and then everyone’s piling on, like, Oh my god. Salesforce has built this thing. You know, we haven’t got this feature. Blah, blah, blah, yeah, first thing I think you as a as a marketer or a competitive intelligence Pro, needs to do is, like, take stock of, like, what’s actually happened. Like, okay, what are the facts here? I’ll tell you. This is where, this is where the cool recording is really useful, because what your competitor says in their blog post and. Their LinkedIn posts and on their website about what they’ve just launched is very, very different to what you know, your shared prospects are actually saying about it in the wild, true. Okay, but the sales team are the first people that have to talk about that, because they are the first team in the company that’s going to get the question from a buyer along the lines of, oh, hey, did you see salesforce’s new feature announcement today? Like, do you guys have that? Like, what do you think about it? So I think that’s another reason why it’s really important to prioritize kind of urgency with sales above those other audiences. Like, I make product decisions based on competition, but I mean, you’ve worked in product too. Like, the decisions I’m making today probably don’t impact customers for a month or two, right? Like you got, you got to, you know, ship it and get adoption so well.
Kyle James 20:49
So that’s interesting. So Right? Call record, we talked a lot about call recordings to gather this intelligence, but like competitor press releases, what are all those kind of data inputs that people should be thinking and looking at like to be gathering this competitive intelligence?
Jon White 21:05
Yes, good question. I we, we categorize it into two kind of, two different types. So one we call the digital footprint. So that’s your kind of classic web data. So the things that you know, if you’re not doing this today, I strongly suggest you buy a product to automate all of this, because it will drive you nuts if you if you try and do it manually. But the things you should be looking at are things like review sites. Look at what your competitors are writing on their website. Obviously, you know, take it with a pinch of salt, because not everything that was ever written on a on a product website is exactly how it looks on the website, right news. Look at, you know, kind of third party content, sites like Reddit. Look at press releases, like the kind of stuff that you can find available online. I think a very powerful source of almost like strategic intent today is LinkedIn, because what you’ll often see is that, you know, a company is is entering a new market, your competitors entering a new market, or they’re launching a new feature, like, look out for what the CEO wrote about it, because the CEO’s messaging is going to be like, a year ahead of the rest of the company. So LinkedIn is another, is another really good channel. So that’s kind of digital footprint, and we we support like 80 different data types across that. The other one is what we call buyer, seller and deal. And this comes from inside your company. Okay, so digital footprint, you know, is on the web, buyer, seller, deal is inside your company. And this is where you’re actually looking at the things that are going on day to day within deals and the sources you should be looking at there. We’ve mentioned call recordings a lot, if you have a way to look at the emails that are going back and forth between your sales team and your CS team and your customers. So for example, Gong supports email tracking. We’re building that feature too. Slack messages, Microsoft Teams messages, there’s a ton of competitive intelligence in your slack. Instance, like not even in the in, not even in the official channels, in like the sales channel or the CS channel. Go and search for a competitive night, you’re going to find hundreds and hundreds of hits, yeah, CRM, like deal notes, and then another really powerful source of competitive Intel is win loss interviews. I think every company on the planet should be doing some form of win loss interview. You know whether you’re running that internally or whether you’re using a partner for that. If you are looking for a partner, we work with a company called closed who I think are really, really good at this stuff. They have these kind of like automated interviews like that is a treasure trove, because, turns out, when you when you get a customer who has bought from you, or has bought from one of your competitors, and you have somebody that doesn’t that wasn’t in the deal, like somebody who’s not the sales rep asking them, why did you buy from us, or why did you buy from them, they will give you nuggets of data that you can use to sell more deals to, you know, tighten up your marketing, or to build bad products.
Kyle James 24:05
It’s a and do you recommend? Like, I guess both, right? Like, I imagine when you win the deal, there’s a honeymoon phase. They’re all excited to tell you why they won. Because, yeah, it’s self validation for them making a good decision, yeah, but when they went with somebody else, I guess maybe it’s still a honeymoon phase for them choosing something else too, a lot of times, right? So just piggyback off of it there too. If you find,
Jon White 24:26
I would say, if you, if you have the resource, you should do win loss interviews, when you win a New Deal, when you lose a new deal, and then also on renewals. Because, like you say, with renewals, the honeymoon phase is over a little bit so the dust has settled. So if you do a if you do a win, so say you won a renewal, if you have an interview with that buyer, obviously, you know they still like your product, and they’re still paying for it because, because you you know you’ve won the renewal. But like you said, you’re going to get a little bit more blunt feedback, because they also kind of know, you know, some downsides, or, you know, where. Where the skeletons are buried. So I think it’s powerful to do that across both types of deal. But I think the most data you’ll get, and you know, sometimes it can be painful, will come from interviewing customers where you’ve lost the deal, sure, because you get very blunt feedback about, you know, where your competitor did better than you, and often it’s not, you know, this company had this feature and you don’t have it. In fact, I’d say like probably less than half the time is actually about the product. A lot of the time it’s about the sales process, whether the sales rep was able to build a good relationship, whether they felt supported, you know, whether you’re whether they see your brand and your company the same way you do.
Kyle James 25:47
I could totally, I mean, we all know this. You learn more when you fail than when you succeed. 100% you just have to ask, right? And people don’t want to like, dwell on that. And if it makes total sense, if you could outsource that like, yeah, find out why we failed to somebody, a third party, to, like, do those uncomfortable conversations, then great. That’s
Jon White 26:05
the third party could be, and I’ve done a ton. Could be someone on your product team. Could be someone on your marketing team. The golden rule is, don’t have the AE that lost the deal go and interview the customer, because they’re just going to come back and say, Oh, everything was great. They just didn’t like this one thing, but they said I was awesome. Like, you got, you got to have someone who,
Kyle James 26:22
yeah, they don’t want to beat them twice. They’ve already beat them up at that point. They don’t want
Jon White 26:26
to lose twice. Yeah.
Kyle James 26:29
So you mentioned this in kind of the external stuff, and you mentioned LinkedIn specifically. But I’m curious, like, what about the rest of social media? Do you, do you look at, look at that for sentiment? Do you look at that more of like, counts of mentions, or, How do y’all think about, do you think about that piece of it too? Because there’s a lot of that out there, but maybe it’s all just noise.
Jon White 26:47
Yeah, we so we mostly sell to B to B companies. I think in B to C, if you’ve got millions and millions of customers, I think that you can get decent sentiment analysis off of social media, most B to B companies can’t because there’s just not enough people talking about you. I think where we find for B to B social, outside of LinkedIn, social to be most powerful is like often a company will post a link to say an announcement blog post on X or Twitter. So it’s not like, you know, you’re gonna, like, read that tweet or that x and, like, glean a bunch of competitive Intel, but if you follow the link, you’re gonna discover something that might help you out. I see, I think in in B to B, I would say LinkedIn is, you know, everyone, everyone’s on LinkedIn. I think it’s really changed from a social network to a content platform over the last five years. Yeah, you know most, most, something like 80% of companies now make their first announced, like when they’re announcing something, like announcing a product feature or an acquisition, or whatever. The first place they start now is LinkedIn, as opposed to, you know, drop it on the PR, you know, PR wire or or somewhere else. So
Kyle James 28:10
your Web’s almost dead at this point. It feels like no one even pays attention to that. Why are you gonna, yeah, to do it when do it yourself?
Jon White 28:16
Yeah, exactly, exactly like your audience is on LinkedIn. So like, you know, put in front of your audience.
Kyle James 28:21
So true. So true. So, so we kind of pushed off on this. And maybe, I think it’s probably a good time. Like, clearly, the way that we’re able to leverage these AI models and things have just like, taken out a barrier that was practically impossible or just too hard, not enough time before. But like, how do you see this changing in the next three to six to nine to 12 months? And I never ask anybody going further than that, because we don’t have a clue further than that at the rate things are going now.
Jon White 28:50
Yeah, I think, I think what we’ve seen, I mean, I still think we’re very, very early in the trend. I actually think the technology is quite mature at this point. Okay, here’s, here’s, like a data point is, you know, the genesis of the Gen AI, kind of movement, or whatever you want to call it, is the kind of the foundational model, like the GPT three, 3.54 Yeah. And you know, the typical use case for that is you type something in and you get an answer back. Now, if you look at open AI, let’s just take open AI as an example. The model itself is not really changing that much anymore. In fact, GPT five. I can’t really tell the difference between GPT four and GPT five, apart from the fact it’s like 20 times more expensive. Like, when we went from three to three to five to four to four Omni, like, there were really meaningful kind of improvements in the underlying technology. If you look all the stuff open AI is doing now, it’s about taking that mod. And using it in different ways. So you’ve got your core chat now you’ve got your reasoning like, so the what’s the the GPT reasoning model? Oh 101, is like GPT four, but with a bunch of like, post training on top of it, then you’ve got deep research, which, again, it’s using the same core technology. So I think what we’re seeing now is less innovation in the core models, but more innovation in the the applications of it. Okay, that makes sense, yeah, yeah. It’s
Kyle James 30:29
kind of like these low agentic front ends, or this is where kind of the MCP stuff comes into play.
Jon White 30:34
Yeah, exactly. And then obviously, now you got operator as well. And I think operator is using GPT four behind the scenes as well, and then you’ve got, you know, gazillion companies out there who are using the APIs to go and build products as well, like us. I think what’s probably going to happen next. And actually, I think it’s happening already. And we, you know, you mentioned that we hosted a podcast yesterday with with a couple of like, industry experts in AI, and they kind of had this take too, is that people are kind of getting overwhelmed, because actually now there’s like, 100 different ways to do the same thing. And you know, if you’re a smart product marketer today, you could probably keep a tool set of, like, 10 or 15 different tools. You could probably do your day job in a half the time, maybe less, right? If you’re really on the leading edge of all this AI technology, there is a ton of stuff out there that’s going to help you do your job better. But the thing is, nobody wants to manage 15 different accounts and copy and paste data between different tools and use this for this use case, use that for that use case. So I think what we’re going to see is that a lot of these technologies start kind of converging into interfaces. And I think those interfaces will be both within, like the foundational models. So the rumor is that open AI is next GPT, GPT six. I think it’s, I think it will be that’s going to have image generation, video generation, agents, reasoning, deep research, chat, all in the same model, and you just ask it question, and it figures out which tool you need to go to a different page. And I think we’re going to see that in enterprise tools as well. Whereas often, you know, you go to a product like Salesforce, there is, there’s AI in 50 different features, but you have to decide, like, which feature you’re going to use, I think what we’ll see is that will consolidate as well. So my my prediction is, over the next 12 months, we’re going to see consolidation and simplification of the way we interact with AI, and I think a lot of that will be what you know the world is currently calling the agent. That’s
Kyle James 32:38
cool. So, so just to kind of feel everybody said that you just had that conversation yesterday on was the future of go to market strategy with clairvo and Ellen Resch, is that that with, I know, I know Claire from, like, what she’s done with chat? PRD, yeah, because that’s that. When that came out a year ago, it’s like, oh my God, for product people, it’s like, look
Jon White 32:59
at this thing. Totally Yeah, we did it. We did it. We did a podcast with them yesterday. So Claire is so Claire’s on our board of directors at crayon, which is, I, you know, I get to pick her brain, and she gives me great product advice all the time. Nice, but, yeah, if you don’t know Claire, Claire’s like, a leading, like, probably one of, like, the top three leading technologists in the world around, like, AI application, like, some of the stuff she’s been, she’s been building, is wild. And then Alon is obviously, like, co founder of Gong, yeah, yeah. Like, tech royalty. So, yeah, we talked yesterday, honestly, about kind of the stuff that we’re talking about today. You know, where does, where does AI take people’s jobs? Like, what, what’s the world going to look like in a few years? You know, what are some of the the challenges that you know, AI is bringing to companies. How are companies going to overcome them? It was, it was a really fun session.
Kyle James 33:49
Nice, nice. So shout out that everybody would listen to this. I’ll have a link to that in the in the show notes. Listen to that too. This is great, John, what have I not asked you? What have we not talked about that you’re thinking about, that that we should kind of wrap up on, like, to leave the audience, like, thinking about stuff so much more we could cover. But like, what are you thinking about now that’s got you really, like, I don’t know.
Jon White 34:12
I think what, what keeps me up at night, in a good way, is if I think about the role of one of our customers, who is, you know, let’s say, a product marketer. I am. I’m very bullish on this technology being able to automate, like a bunch of people’s work. I don’t think everyone’s gonna lose their jobs. I’m not like, I don’t think AI, the robots are going to replace us. I think, if anything, it’s going to give us the time to do the job that we thought we were hired to do in the first place. I think a lot about, like, the boundaries of like, what are the things that AI can take care of for me, and then what are the things that actually the humans still need to do? Because I actually think there’s quite a lot of stuff. That, you know, AI is fantastic, but I think there’s quite a lot of stuff that actually is not automatable now. And I
Kyle James 35:04
think I could have come up with original thoughts at all ever, right? I think the way I like
Jon White 35:09
so I’ll give you a tangible example. So we, well, I won’t name I won’t name names. I’ll anonymize the parties involved. But, you know, we have a competitor that we, you know, obviously, you know, we’re up in deals against all the time, and, you know, we like to have a set of talk tracks ready for our AES when this competitor comes up in calls, okay? And as part of that, we kind of have this narrative that we’ve created. Then it, you know, it’s a Google Doc, and it’s, you know, a couple of minutes, like, elevator pitch. Yeah, that elevator pitch, two minutes long, probably gets used in 90% of deals that was not written by AI, that was written by a bunch of really smart humans over the course of, like, a month, like, a series of really, you know, intense debate meetings, you know. Okay, let’s try this. Let’s get one of our AES to go and try that on a couple of calls. Listen to the call recording. Okay, this bit worked. This bit didn’t to craft that kind of like, almost like, underlying strategy was a lot of manual work from, you know, a lot of very intelligent people. And I just, I can’t see an AI doing that. Now, what AI can do, AI can brainstorm for you and say, Hey, give us some ideas. Like, what are some ways that we could get this point across? What are some ways that we could land this talk track, but the bit where you actually have to do it and test it with customers and debate it and, you know, talk to the head of sales, talk to the head of CS. There’s just a lot of like, strategy and collaboration that happens in organizations that, you know, even, even if you believe in the future where agents are going to be joining our freaking zoom calls, I think we are a long way away from Ai being able to do that, and I think we’ve we’ve got to be upfront about that with ourselves, and also for people like us at crane, we’ve got to be upfront about that with our customers, because I think there’s a lot of companies out there that are saying, AI, can do it all, and eventually it’s going to be the customers that fail. I think the marketers that are the smartest in this trend just kind of like intuitively know where the boundaries are. They know where they need to go and spend 10 hours obsessing over a problem because only they can do it where, as opposed to, you know, outsourcing it to technology. So I think walking that boundary is a really, a really important point that I think people need to spend more time on. Yeah,
Kyle James 37:31
yeah. So just to kind of repeat what I think I heard you say, just to kind of clarify for me and everybody else, it’s, it’s like the creative aspects, and the aspects that actually people enjoy doing are going to be the things that people get to lean in more, and the busy work we’re going to be able to hand that off to AI, to be able to handle it. Is that, is that kind of like,
Jon White 37:53
Yeah, I think it’s that. And I think it’s just being knowing, like, what you can hand off to AI, yeah, and what you can’t I’ll give you, I’ll give you one more example. So we, we did that webinar yesterday with Claire and Elon, and within like two hours, someone on our product marketing team had turned it into a blog post. And the blog post is awesome, like you should go and check it out. It’s on crown.co that blog post was mostly written by taking that call transcript, sticking it into AI. We have a we have a company, GPT, and I didn’t talk to Shannon how she did it, but I imagine, like 90% of that blog post was written by AI and then she fine. That’s a great example of where AI has just made Shannon 10 times more productive. Okay, but if we told AI, Hey, go and write all the questions for the webinar and come up with the answers, etc, like the source content there, it would not have done as good a job. Yes, you just providing it the core, like, what? Yeah, right. You gotta be deliberate about what you’re handing off and what you’re
Kyle James 38:57
not. I’ve noticed that too. Yeah, if you’ve been very specific, and pull from this and give it some prompts and walk it through some steps, of like, what it should talk about, what it should write about. Yeah, it’s great at that, but you still got to be like, pulling some levers, of like, don’t know, this isn’t worth mentioning in that, this is 100% Yeah, no, this is great. This is great. John, thanks. Thank you so much for joining me here today, and super insightful. And, you know, I think competitive intelligence one of those things that people don’t always think about, but it’s such a core aspect of you know how to be more competitive and see growth in their job and what their and what their companies are doing. Because, you know, what is the art of war? Know your enemies better than you do your friends kind of thing? Yep, totally. That’s what you’re enabling, right?
Jon White 39:45
Yeah, and I think, like it’s often, it does get a bit neglected, but if you talk to a sales rep, they’re having competitive conversations every single day,
Kyle James 39:54
yeah? So hand to hand combat, right? You
Jon White 39:58
can help them, or you’re not, like. You don’t help them. They’re just going to going to go and make stuff up. And that might be good. It might be not. So I think, you know, companies, companies just spend more time talking to their sales teams and understanding how this stuff works in the wild. Because I think when they do that, they’ll realize there’s real opportunities to win more deals, make more money, which is obviously why we’re here.
Kyle James 40:18
Absolutely 100% so kind of wrapping up, how could people find you and what can they help you with? Clearly, we’ve already talked about the webinar a little bit, but what, what else you got going on? What are your light longs? And how can people connect with you? Yeah,
Jon White 40:31
I think the best way to connect with me these days is on LinkedIn. I will try and respond to almost every message, unless you’re selling something, I still try and respond, but a slightly lower response rate on those. And I just love talking to other people. Doesn’t even necessarily have to be product engineers or designers, other people that are doing cool stuff with technology, doesn’t even need to be aI like I love connecting with people who are building things, who’ve discovered things. You know, I’m in a couple of, like, round tables with other, like product people who are doing the same thing. So you know, if you got some cool stuff you’re building, or you want to hear about some of the stuff we’re building, reach out and let’s chat. Love
Kyle James 41:13
it. Love it. Well, this is the intro everybody needs. So reach out and talk to dot John. And obviously, if
Jon White 41:19
you, are, if you’re if you think your sales team could be winning more deals, if you think you’re losing competitive deals, check out crown as well, because we can really help you.
Kyle James 41:26
Absolutely awesome. So everybody out there, if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe. Like leave it a five star review. Nothing, nothing lower than five stars, obviously. And yeah, appreciate you listening and keep growing everybody. And we’ll talk to you next week with another GTM innovator.