AI in July: Key insights from 3 leaders unlocking AI’s potential

Welcome back to Flight School, and happy JulAI everyone 🤖. With the weather heating up, it’s the perfect time to talk about tech’s hottest topic: artificial intelligence.

In the past two years, AI has gone from a nice-to-have to a must-have for most SaaS companies. As Managing Director Lonne Jaffe puts it:

“The discussion will likely shift from the novelty of AI to the nuances of its integration into existing products and services. The emphasis will be on how seamlessly AI can be woven into the fabric of daily business operations to enhance productivity and decision-making. Attention will turn to the refinement of AI outputs, reducing errors, managing legal and regulatory issues, and improving the user experience.”

Writer , Weights & Biases , and 6sense have all embraced AI, but each offers a different lesson for #startups and #ScaleUps, including:

1️⃣ Scaling an AI-forward company and building a board that believes in your vision

2️⃣ Uniquely understanding the pain points of your customers when building out AI capabilities

3️⃣ Transforming your current product offering with AI

🔎 How is AI affecting your business? Let us know in the comments below.

May Habib is challenging a $13 billion incumbent with Writer — and it looks like she’s winning

Writer launched into a market with an established incumbent: Grammarly was the most similar company in the AI writing space. But CEO and cofounder May Habib saw that $13B company’s existence in the space as a reason to compete, not an excuse to avoid the sector.

“We wanted to compete and beat them at two angles,” she says. “We wanted to go from being able to edit content to creating content, and really do it from a place of trust, not weirdness. The second thing was, we wanted to beat them at privacy, security, and enterprise readiness.”

When the company raised its $5M seed funding in 2020, its big vision slide proclaimed that the company wanted to go from “AI-assisted writing today” to simply, “AI writing” later. 

Habib quickly took the slide out of their deck when sending it to customers because “it scared the shit out of people,” she admits. Fast-forward a few years, and the conversation has changed quite a bit.

ChatGPT revolutionized the space in November 2022, and while the influx of new startups looking to capitalize on the trend for generative AI tools has raised the level of competition, it has also helped Writer position itself in the market. “What has happened post-ChatGPT is the risk associated with trying AI has gone to zero. Now you kind of look silly if you’re not logging into it.”

For example, Habib points to one individual customer who initially resisted trying the tool in its early days because of her suspicion of AI.

“It took her son bringing talk of ChatGPT home from his fourth-grade classroom for her to say: ‘Alright, fine, I’ll join one of your demos,’” Habib recalls. ChatGPT’s success was a “crossing-the-chasm” moment that helped bring customers along.

Habib knew she also needed to craft a board to support her vision for Writer in the long term. She explained her deliberate approach in choosing members who could provide diverse perspectives and understand the company’s vision. The board she built was intentionally large to accommodate various voices and perspectives, which has proven to be powerful for the company.

“We wanted to make sure that the board really represented where we wanted to be, what kind of company we wanted to be over the next few years, and really worked backwards from that,” she said. Habib emphasized the importance of handpicking each board member based on the value they could bring to the table and their potential to aid the company’s growth.

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How Lukas Biewald grew Weights & Biases from a side project to the AI revolution’s must-use service

Weights & Biases ’ cofounder and CEO Lukas Biewald created the company to make life easier for machine learning practitioners like his friends at OpenAI . 

He’d realized through his internship and classes that AI systems require a completely new style of coding, which meant that developers needed a different model of software and best practices to be successful.  

In 2018, alongside his CrowdFlower cofounder Chris Van Pelt and Google engineer Shawn Lewis , Biewald founded Weights & Biases. They developed their first product – Experiment Tracking — in an Airbnb they rented to host a hack day.

The tool did something simple but revolutionary for AI developers struggling to stress-test and check their models: It showed them exactly how those models worked.

The Weights & Biases founding team made what many would see as a rookie mistake, but which paid off in the long run. They almost singularly developed their product to meet the needs of one customer. 

“We felt a little insecure,” Biewald says. The startup was hostage to fortune based on OpenAI’s success. 

But it paid off, in large part because OpenAI was operating on such a large scale — and at a more advanced level — than everyone else in the market at the time. That meant that when competitors caught up, Weights & Biases was ready to serve them. The company now counts Meta , Samsung Electronics , and Spotify among its customers. 

For years, Biewald continued teaching his AI class while building Weights & Biases. This experience helped him appreciate what programmers at both ends of the market — from beginners to advanced users like W&B's corporate customers — would need from his tools.

“I started to use it myself more and more in the classes,” he says. “I really felt the customer pains so deeply.”

The uniting desire with both beginners and enterprise clients? They “both want things to be clear and simple,” according to Biewald. “There is more overlap there than you might think.”

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How CEO Jason Zintak transformed 6sense’s product with AI 

6sense CEO Jason Zintak took over a business that was struggling with its unit economics and cash burn while needing to improve product and better define the category. On top of this, he inherited a complex cap table with seasoned investors who were confident in the team and technology and believed in the promise of the market opportunity they represented.

“In this case, it wasn’t enough to have good technology; you need to be able to be a manager and manage people,” he says.

“The founders had less corporate practical experience. I always like to say I’ve seen the movies. I know pattern recognition, and I know what good looks like.”

But one of the biggest hurdles 6sense faced was its product offering.

Initially, the company’s software was perceived as a ‘black box,’ taking data and using AI to produce a simple score indicating a prospect’s likelihood to buy. However, Zintak quickly realized this approach was not resonating with customers.

“The very first thing I did was say, ‘People are skeptical. We need to give them the context of the score. Why is it a one? Why is it a two?’”

He initiated an evolution in the company’s product to allow customers to not only know a prospect’s propensity to buy but also use analytics to execute sales and marketing tactics.

Step one was to implement a more transparent, context-oriented scoring system that allowed customers to see why it rated each prospect as it did.

Step two: Provide the intelligence to make decisions based on the rating.

Step three: Use that intelligence to bring sellers and marketers together with shared data and workflows. The vision of insight married with execution is reflected in what became the company’s tagline: Know everything, do anything.

Setting up the go-to-market strategy was another priority. 6sense needed to demonstrate to potential customers that its AI-led product offered a differentiated, more effective way of conducting sales and marketing. Zintak saw the potential to reinvent sales and marketing, bringing the two functions together as one cohesive revenue team to achieve the same goals.

This required educating the market about the value of data-driven decision-making and the power of AI.

Through these early challenges, Zintak remained steadfast, applying the same principles that had served him well throughout his career: listen to the customers, understand their needs, and constantly innovate to meet those needs.

These principles guided him through the difficult early days and laid the foundation for 6sense’s future success. And it’s ultimately what gave Insight the confidence to invest.

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✍️ Reach out if you want to tell us your #AI story: content@insightpartners.com.

On that note, registration is now open for ScaleUp:AI! Join founders, investors, enterprise executives, and luminaries all focused on the hottest topics in AI innovation.

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