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Chapter 1: What are the challenges of traditional CRMs in data management?
Welcome to Corozant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast. Do you work in emerging tech, working on something innovative, maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corozant.com forward slash brand. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Matt Cerna. Matt Surna is head of go-to-market at Lightfield, the fastest growing AI native CRM.
At Lightfield, he focuses on working with startups to deploy agents that help acquire, engage, and retain new customers. Prior to Lightfield, he served as chief marketing officer at Replicant, a market leader in AI customer service, and at Notable, a healthcare AI company that automates millions of back-office workflows for healthcare providers.
Matt works with transformative, category-defining AI companies to accelerate their growth. Well, good afternoon, Matt.
Chapter 2: How does Lightfield's agentic CRM address data capture?
Welcome to the show. Happy to be here. Awesome, Matt. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Traversing globes, the globe today a little bit, just from San Francisco to Kansas City, not a big deal, but I appreciate you making the time.
And Matt, if you don't mind jumping into your first question here, you've built a career going from MuleSoft to Notable to Replicant and now Lightfield, each a category defining AI company at an earlier and earlier stage. What draws you to these inflection point companies and what made Lightfield the right next chapter?
It's a great place to start, Brian. At the end of the day, as I reflect back on my career and how I decide the companies and the people I want to work with, ultimately, I look at what's going to give me the most energy and what's going to help me do the best work I can.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of AI-native foundations in CRMs?
And really, that comes down to taking massive swings in big markets that are ready to be disrupted, where there's a lot of people whose lives can be improved if we can be successful in our mission. That's what gives me energy. And so...
Reflecting back on those companies, notable, we were taking on all of the manual, paper-filled, fax-filled, back office healthcare workflows and replacing that with AI to make healthcare more accessible and affordable for folks.
to Replicant, where we were helping a lot of large consumer brands replace old school customer service, where you wait on hold for 20 minutes to talk to somebody, to with AI agents, where you can instantly have your question or inquiry resolved, to Lightfield, which is the category leading agentic CRM, which is poised to do in the AI world what Salesforce did for the cloud world.
And that's what I'm so excited to talk about today. That's awesome.
Really appreciate that. And I liked really your career philosophy. When you jumped into this, you made that statement, what's going to give you the most energy, right?
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Chapter 4: How does AI transform customer engagement in sales?
And you tackle those problems that were notable and meaningful and truly making the world a better place, which obviously fulfills you. And of course, now working at Lightfield, which is awesome that, as you mentioned, that category leading a genetic AI system. And I know you guys built that from the ground up. So that's awesome. And we'll get right into that.
Matt, your traditional CRMs were essentially built on the assumption that humans would manually log everything. Lightfield's premise is that AI should automatically capture every customer interaction from calls, emails, meetings, messages, and structure them into a living system of record without anyone touching a field.
How big is the data quality problem in legacy CRMs and how much revenue is left on the table because of it?
Well, it's absolutely massive. And if you think back about the real purpose of the CRM, pre-AI, it was used more as a tool to understand and manage the business for management layers and finance to forecast how a business is growing.
Chapter 5: What misconceptions do buyers have about AI features in CRMs?
But it didn't really do anything for the people that are actually selling the product. Right. And without any incentive as the person selling the product, talking to customers to go and engage the system, you end up with a lot of incomplete, old or stale data. And in a world where AI agents are so powerful and the models get better every single day,
It's become a real missed opportunity because what we've seen is that conceptually, theoretically, the agents are smart enough to go perform almost any go-to-market task from researching accounts, writing follow-up emails, managing your pipeline for you. But it can only do that if it's given the right context and the right data, which you just don't have with a pre-agentic CRM.
And that's really the problem that we've invested in solving at Whitefield.
Amazing. Really appreciate that. And you're absolutely right.
Chapter 6: How can businesses leverage AI for competitive advantage?
I don't know how many CRMs have come and gone, but there's some big ones and everybody's trying to get that market share. But the pre-AI CRMs definitely just where there is a knowledge base for many of the departments, except for those in sales. Right. So I like how agentic AI is very powerful and it's able to do a lot of the tasks and tie different.
tables, databases, or companies together to be able to fully serve the person that is serving the customer at the time. So thank you. Matt, you've made the case that most AI CRMs are just a layer on top of a broken foundation and that if the underlying database is empty because humans never entered the data, the AI has nothing to work with.
How do you explain that structural difference to a skeptical buyer who's already been burned by an AI feature that didn't deliver? And what's the moment in a demo where it really clicks?
That's a great question where I would say it actually it's I think the phrase you use AI feature actually explains everything.
Chapter 7: What does the future of AI-native CRMs look like?
What we have found is that when you try and add an AI feature to an old system, you run into the problems I talked about where you have the AI reasoning off of incomplete context or structure or missing data. And this is why we really believe that the entire system of record that you use to manage your business has to change in order to realize the benefits of AI.
In terms of how I explain the difference, I'm actually a believer of show, not tell. And recently, one thing we've been doing is we actually set up an environment for the people we're talking to to experience the power of Lightfield prior to ever entering into a financial engagement with us.
Agents are so powerful now that they actually very quickly set up an environment and move data over from a legacy CRM. And that's really given, you know, transformed our go-to-market so that it's, I'm not in the business trying to convince people why we're a better product.
I'm in the business of giving people our product to touch and feel and play with to see that difference and experience it directly for themselves. That's awesome. Yeah.
And I was reading about your migrations from existing platforms into Lightfield. And it is amazing. You talked about that just now with that, the power of AI and what it can do and how fast it can migrate. And it's just, you know, Really, you're telling the customer, hey, in 30 minutes, maybe a little more, you'll be working right in your new CRM. And I think that's amazing.
And you're right about this AI feature. We've been talking about this now for three years at least. It's a buzzword and it might sound sexy, but many times AI is just bolted on an existing system. And in Lightfield's case, completely different. And I really appreciate your thoughts on that.
Yeah.
And Matt, as we look ahead to the future, right, as AI matures and the boundary between human and machine action and sales continues to blur, where do you see the CRM category in five years? And what does the winning AI native platform need to get right today to define what that future really looks like?
Well, I think five years is probably a longer time horizon than that I can forecast. If you think back to five years from now, 2021, the world was a very different place. And I'm sure the world will be a very different place five years from now. What I can say is I don't think in the five year time horizon, I think it right now.
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