00:34:03 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:34:03] S1: Okay. Yeah. It makes sense. I think you ran an experiment where you gave Claude, Chad GPT, and Perplexity, like the exact same incentive, and they behave like completely differently. So if AI becomes part of the buying process, do companies need a different go to market strategy for every model, or do you feel like it's gonna converge into into one way of of working?
00:34:27 · George Bonaci
[00:34:27] S0: I don't know, but I think it's probably pretty analogous to, like, selling to humans. Like, I think you have a different way of selling to different personas, different pain points, to different industries, to different segments. It's probably going to be somewhat similar selling to AI agents. So I won't say necessarily to to models, but to agents. I think human beings are delegating a lot of the decision making power to their agents or to LLMs in general, should say. Maybe not even to agents yet, but to LLMs in general. I think that's going to continue. Like this is maybe the only thing that I do strongly believe in. They're going to delegate more and more decision making to actual agents and And the distinction being the agents can actually like take action. So they're not only gonna delegate the decision making, they're gonna delegate the action, the implementation, like the usage of whatever it is that they're buying. And so like who you're marketing and selling to isn't actually the human being anymore, it's the agent. And like the other side of that coin is true as well. Like if we're automating a lot of like through traditional or like run rate marketing, then you've just got agents marketing to agents. And there's going to be different personas and different segments and different pain points. And I do think that's the future of marketing. I actually think maybe it'll take a little bit longer to get there than than I first expected, but it is 100% happening. I would argue that, like, AEO is like a little bit of like a pigeonholed term. It's like, yeah. It's SEO, but for AI. It's like, no. No. No. Like, it's basically all of marketing, but for AI. So I think like AEO is going to become the... Or is already probably the most important channel for any company, whether you're b to c or or b to b. But it's a lot more than influencing the decisions. It's also making sure that the agent can actually sign up for your products, that your agent can like implement the product, that your agent can understand the value it's getting from the product. That like your agents as like a company can help that agent to do all of these things, get around bugs, like respond to support tickets. Again, it's like, it's no different than if I took an intern and said like, hey, go figure out like the best solution for this problem and go implement it.
00:36:10 · George Bonaci, Guillaume Moubeche
It's just now happening at a much larger scale and being amplified. Again, AI being like a large lever. [00:36:15] S1: And how exactly do you build ramp so it becomes like the obvious choice for agents to use? [00:36:22] S0: That I think is actually like a a pretty deep technical question. Like, I... Like, if I were to, like, summarize it, the product has to be discoverable by agents. They just have to understand the pros and cons in some objective way, and the product has to be usable by the agent. There was an interesting study. I'll try to find the details and I can share it with you maybe later. But there's an interesting study that basically found like the the products, the individual very tactical products that like an LLM is recommending has actually a lot to do with the other products it knows that you're using. And it's recommending it because it knows that there are either like deep integrations or they work well together. Other people that use x happen to also use y, so we're gonna recommend y for your use case. And so making sure that your product plays nicely with complementary or tangential products and making sure that it's easy for like the AI to understand that and to actually like onboard actually like makes a really, really big difference.
00:37:09 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:37:09] S1: Nice. Yeah. Actually, I saw like a website the other day that is basically like ranking pretty much like every SaaS company based on whether or not the AI understand like your API or MCP, if you have like an MCP. But it's... I think, yeah, it's pretty pretty interesting. And do you have like customers asking you what should they put in place so their agent can actually use credit card? And does it work the same as for human? Like, you put the spend management limit for your agents. Have you started, you know, having, like, more validation processes or loops that you can introduce? Like, how exactly is is it different? Yeah.
00:37:47 · George Bonaci
[00:37:47] S0: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yes to all of the above. Like, it's actually really cool being a user of Ramp as well as just working there. It's like every time I use it, it's it's just easier. It's more invisible to me. It's like, oh, I used to have to, like, take a picture of my receipts. Like, oh, now we're able to do some some on device, like, image recognition, and it'll pull the receipt picture out of my, like, camera roll for me. It's like, oh, I don't even need to do all of that. There's a back end of native integration. It's like, don't even need to do any of that. It... Like, that agent already looked at my calendar. It knows that this is going to be in policy even though it was taken on a... Or like the Uber trip was taken on a weekend. Like, knows this and knows that. And like, don't even see anything occurring. So it's happening in the background. And I think a lot more of of like the deep AI integrations in the products is going to mean that the work becomes invisible or the work that probably never should have happened in the first place. Like you now no longer responsible for. So it's it's very cool being on the receiving end of that. I do think though that the investments in the technology to make these things possible is is actually really, really important. Like a lot of the things that we end up providing to our customers or offering to our customers, like we built for ourselves internally. Like I spent a lot of time talking about how important, like being able to to route requests to the best model is because most people aren't gonna put that much thought into it. It's like, that's why we built a router. That's why we built like a universal harness. And they've produced such tremendous value for us internally. And this is like, at some some point, it's like, Well, why don't we just sell it? And I think that's part of the magic of Ramp, but it's also helped me deeply understand how the technology is is actually being useful even when you can't see it.
00:39:14 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:39:14] S1: Interesting. To be honest, like, I love the the feature of being able to get it from the camera roll and not having to upload it. But a question for you on that specific topic because it's out of interest, I never truly understood why you needed to attach a photo. I mean, I understand, you know, like for an invoice or whatever, but let's say you go to a restaurant. In my opinion, it's pretty obvious that everyone knows that it's a restaurant and everyone knows that you're paying for food. You know? Like, so, like, how exactly... Like, why do you think no one has ever built something that's connected to pretty much, like, every single restaurant and that matches the credit card payment with, you know, like... And can kind of create the invoice for both and not having to... Because even the the fact of taking your camera or, like, your phone, like, take a photo of something, it's such a waste of time. If you think about it, you know, you have, like, billions of people on the planet. It takes maybe, like, five or ten seconds for people to do it. It's a huge amount of wasted time, you know, like, every day.