Louise Ballard on The Sales Scoop, Co-Founder @ Atheni.ai

Automated Transcript

Alastair Cole 0:05

Hello, good afternoon and welcome to The Sales Scoop. This is a weekly live show for tech business founders who want to accelerate their sales. I'm Alastair Cole, your host for today. I have a degree in artificial intelligence and two decades experience in sales and marketing, and I'm delighted to say that I'm joined today by Louise Ballard, who is a co-founder of Atheni.ai.

Louise Ballard 0:45

Of course, the mute button, it catches you out every time! So yes, hello, Alastair, how are you? I'm very good. It's great to have you here this afternoon. Really excited about our discussion. We share a lot of similar interests in AI and background in communications as well, which is great. Before we get into your sales scoop, could we, could you tell us a little bit about you and your journey to get to Athenia.ai.

Louise Ballard 1:18

Yes, absolutely. As a middle aged woman in AI, it's often a question that people are quite interested in, how I kind of got here in the end, and my background was communications. I spent 30 years working in communications, kind of on and off, starting, funnily enough, as a teacher, working out in Austria a long time ago, and then into communications, in banking and in PR agencies. And then I had my own PR agency in the noughties, which I went on to sell to huntsworth, and then took time out. And this is, I think, an interesting point as well when it comes to AI, which is that AI is classified as a tech. Absolutely is a tech. It's a tech under the bonnet. But as soon as generative AI came out in 2022 I became completely fascinated, and it felt like what happened is that it brought all my experience together and allowed me to really harness everything that I'd learned, all those different types of experiences that I'd had through my career, and we, you know, and I became passionate about it. So, that's kind of the journey to, kind of where we started. And then I met up with my co-founder, who had been a client, actually, at a previous job at the agency that I had had so 15 years ago. And she was coming at it from the skills perspective. I was coming at it being a kind of, this is an enabler of humans. She was coming at it from a skills perspective, which was, you know, the human skills that we're going to require going into the future are changing. Have changed, and we need to make sure that education and skills training keep up with that. So that's how we kind of came along on AI. And we started helping businesses to figure out how they could integrate it into their business. And we realized more and more it was a mindset shift. It was much more to do with mindset than technology. The technology is all here, but how do you get people to trust it, to try it, to use it, to take things that they have done in one way for 2030, years and do it in a different way. And that's how we came up with the theme of AI. So it almost should be like someone sitting next to you telling you the use cases, helping you to use it. So that's how I've got here so bit of an interesting route,

Alastair Cole 3:34

yeah, like, fascinating, much like myself in terms of, you know, communications. And now in a, more recently, in a kind of, heavily AI focused and tech role. And you, you were chairing just before we went live about what's happening, what the very latest is with the me and what's in the news now, give us an update

Louise Ballard 3:55

on, yeah, so, so we started, I think what we've realized, and this is when you look back and you listen to some of the speeches of some of the leaders in Silicon Valley about AI, you realize that what AI actually is, is a huge facilitator of humans and we and domain expertise. That's what Jensen Huang says from Nvidia, is that suddenly it's democratized. You don't need to know how to code anymore, because it has democratized the way that we do things. And that's exactly what we realized when we realized we needed to create a coach or an assistant or someone that sat next to people we were in the position. And Mackenzie, my co-founder, has worked in tech before, but she's not a techie in the same way we were able to be. We will be able to be right at the front, and we are actually interesting right at the front of some of the experimentation that's going on using generative AI models to create products. And it's kind of called the application layer. It sits on top of the LLMs. And so we have created a. Platform which will allow people to learn how to use generative AI as they are working. So it creates a personalized configuration for them, which means it knows exactly who you are, what your job is, how you like to learn and at the same time, by using AI, we're able to create use cases that can 100% be tailored to you, to your role, to your job. We've created a prompt engine which takes that whole Am I asking it the right thing? Oh, it's not really done what I've wanted. It takes that away. And we've created some sort of small instructional videos using AI, just to make it super easy, because the trouble with current training is that it's out of date. As soon as you've done it, it's out of date, and it's not relevant. And this technology is a very different type of technology than anything we've had before, which came top down. This actually has to come bottom up and side to side. And the best examples where it is integrated, it's where team leaders say, you go, you go and try, you go and experiment, and people are able to find the use cases, but that's quite slow, so we're trying to accelerate that. So we launch our new platform, hopefully next week, and we're fundraising.

Alastair Cole 6:10

Okay, that's very exciting. And seeing, as you just mentioned it, where should people go? Where should they go?

Louise Ballard 6:17

Yeah, go to Atheni.ai, right now, it's a very clunky site, which will provide you with a configuration for your chat GPT you fill out a few questions, hopefully in the next week or so, that will be the full platform. So yeah, so this is kind of what we're likely to be doing. You'll be able to have your different tools. You'll be able to see what you've achieved. And the biggest gap that we're seeing right now actually isn't in technology, as I said, but I think McKinsey did a recent report where 90% of people are using this at work, but only 6% of people feel that they have any amount of skill or training. So they're using it at a super basic level. And I think for everyone listening, the important thing is to think, Okay, I might be using it for an email or I might be using it for doing a bit of research, but there is a much, much bigger step up to really achieving the value, and that is actually quite to do with a mindset shift, of being able to trust it, of being able to try different things, of having the imagination. So that's what we've tried to do with Atheni.ai, it makes that easier for people. And our background is in communication, human capital, and behavioral science. So we're coming at it from the human perspective, not from the tech perspective. We like to think that you need humans to help solve human problems, not technologists. So that's the challenge at the moment, I think, is for people to not to fall into the sense of, Oh, I know about this, but to think, what? What more can I do? Can I try something with AI and in a sales process or in a marketing process? What if I asked? What if I uploaded my presentation and asked for some critique? You'll be amazed to see how helpful it can be, particularly if it's configured to know you and your job. And the LLMs are getting much better at knowing you anyway, but the more tailored you can make it, the better the answers. And one example that I did recently is when I held a workshop last week. So all of the entrepreneurs here were writing grants or writing proposals. I uploaded all of my Atheni.ai information into a project area in Claude, all of the information about the grant, and I wrote a grant within six hours. Okay, now that was not possible to do without grant writing. And it wasn't written without AI. It wasn't written like AI. It was written in my style, from my information, based on the requirement. So this is where I use the analogy. It's like my combine harvester. I think you're going to possibly, I think you know my combine harvester, but my combine harvester is kind of how we need to see I'm still a farmer if I use a scythe or if I use a combine harvester. So here's my combine harvester. If you use AI as your combine harvester, it's not just how much quicker you can do things, it's also how much more you can achieve. And you have to shift your mind to think, Hmm, Could I try this? At least try this and see what comes back. Well, I

Alastair Cole 9:23

I want to come back to the combine harvester. I've got several things queued up here that I want to ask you about, but you've just beautifully articulated the skills gap, right? 96% use it 6% properly. Yeah, there's the gap. It's 90% huge, huge gap. And you know where you are seeing the biggest areas? Where is that gap? Largest? Where shouldn't it be? You know, that large. And you know what you are observing in different industries, what's out there? Yes,

Louise Ballard 9:56

It's really interesting. And Davos, you know, which was. The World Economic Forum that was on a couple of weeks ago. Now there's a lot of the great and the good talking about the investments they're putting in AI and all of the rest, and you know, the investments they're spending. And the stat from last October from BCG was that 74% of big generative AI projects are failing, and they're failing 70% because of people and process only 10 and 20% respectively for algorithms and technology. So, you know, the human side of this is the biggest gap, is the biggest issue. And it isn't about changing the way that we work. It isn't about using a technology like we used Excel. It's about saying this is going to be an entirely different way that we're going to work. And we're going to work in a way which allows us to orchestrate differently whether it's agents or staff members. But if someone is going to hire you, they are going to want to know that you are AI literate. And that means more than just using it to do the odd email. It means that it is integrated completely into your work. And this is where the big gap is, right now. I've been training up until now . It's either expensive or it's out of date. Because of the pace of change, things are going so quickly, it's out of date, so fast that you have already moved on. So the way that we've done things in the past and not going to work in the future. I was on a call with I did a training course in the US recently on kind of AI for business leaders from one of the kind of the top leaders, and she had Mustafa Suleiman from Microsoft AI on a fireside chat, and he said, the pace of change that we're going to see. So if we look 15 years ahead from now, we are basically looking at the equivalent of 45 years ago from where we are today. So that change is coming so fast that traditional training can't really keep up. So this is a big gap for leaders in large organizations who are more worried about security, more worried about all of this and then dropping the ball. And it's actually a fabulous opportunity for entrepreneurs, for smaller businesses, to leapfrog. So if you're in a smaller business, this is a perfect place to say, Okay, let me get on with it. Let me find out. Let me take my own career, my own in my own hands. Because actually, if I have a small team, then I can orchestrate everybody, get everybody up to speed, give them the space, give them the encouragement, give them a theme when it comes and then we can, we can see how we're going to, how we're going to move this forward together. Because it's not something you can leap into as a CEO and suddenly say, Well, I now know how to use AI and the McKinsey Report, it's called Super agency in the workplace talks a lot about leaders. Are the ones blocking this actually, leaders aren't being bold enough. Leaders can't imagine how they can reimagine their organizations. Remember Kodak? You know? Remember some of these companies that haven't been able to shift their mindset fast enough? So it is change management is a gap change and people and excitement for it, not fear. And the media have propagated a very strong view of, kind of like, it's going to take your job. Well, actually, something happened in the US last week, which is quite interesting. The copyright office said you can now copyright human plus AI work. You cannot copyright AI only generated work. So that demonstrates the power of the human plus. So this is how we always say it's human plus. See yourself as a false multi. It's a false multiplier. It amplifies what you do, but it does not replace you. Well, not for a long time yet is it going to be able to make the sorts of decisions we need to make.

Alastair Cole 13:46

Yeah, as Mark Twain said, you know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. And you know, since the dawn of technology, those earliest tools, and when I cast my mind back to reading computer science, and we were looking at human computer interaction, the very the earliest kind of, you know, interfaces for the web. You could just throw some stuff up there, but actually you needed to understand, you know, humans and psychology, and actually understand the human in order to design it well. So it's always that the tool you We hope the tool is going to work on its own, but it's always about how we use it. The difference now is that the AI world is so vast and so fast and so powerful, there's orders of magnitude more significant. And I think that's what leads to the CEO blocker, because it's almost like they need their own course on how to how to bring AI in as a CEO, they become a bottleneck. So it is rhyming. It's always about the people. That's why I studied psychology as an undergraduate, as well as computer science, and they, they're famously together. You know, your background in communications. You know, I think it's fascinating that you've got that, and now you're in a position where you're helping communicate and allowing others to communicate better. And you are a big fan of metaphors. We've had the harvester, I think my favorite, because it's, yeah, with my military family and background, is the jet fighter where you were quoted in the Financial Times. And, you know, yes, they seem to work these metaphors. What is it about your your background and what you're working with now that is, is enabling you to get that message across?

Louise Ballard 15:35

Well, I think, I think it is true, and I think for me, you know, I'd like we at Atheni.ai, when we're here, we want to be here for everybody. Okay, we're not just here for the top companies, for the lawyers, for the bankers, for us. We're most interested in those people that are going to get left behind. Okay? We want to make sure that nobody gets left behind in this AI revolution. And therefore you know some of this if you tell a story, and if you talk about it in a way which people can understand, and it's not, it's not that they can't understand what generative AI is. And I'm not trying to be patronizing in any way. It's just like you suddenly get a switch flicked. And it was actually a client of mine many years ago, who talked about pensions like this. And he talked about the four horsemen of the apocalypse, or five, I don't remember, in the perfect storm, and all sorts of things in what was a very dry subject. And I remember back then thinking, and it was at the beginning where storytelling was becoming part of PR, I suppose. And I remember back then thinking, this is so powerful, because suddenly you can understand the magnitude. You can understand what this means. And people think it's quite funny. And actually, at the FT I was speaking, I've been speaking with one of the, you know, the reporter who or the journalist who wrote the piece about predictions, which is where I was quoted, and that the Ferrari metaphor, which is one that I also use quite a lot has really stuck in her mind that we've given everyone keys to the Ferrari, it's the most incredibly powerful beast. But we haven't given them any driving lessons, you know? We've just taught them they can't get out of the car park and I think once you realize that actually most of our usage, most people's usage, of generative AI right now, is right on that first level. And that's great, you know, it's absolutely but get stuck in. See it as a force multiplier. See it as the thing that's going to allow your business to expand and use it as that tool, just like, you know, you're still the farmer, go back to it, or you're still a fighter, you know. But a fighter jet needs a flight plan and it needs a pilot. It's not very much used on its own, and so this is how you have to see this thing. And you need new skills to be able to do it. And those new skills, interestingly, a lot come back to communication skills, because the communication with AI is in your natural language. It's not in code. How do you communicate? And I wake up sometimes. It's probably an entrepreneur's thing at 4am and where do I reach now, instead of my pen and paper, I used to write down the things I was going to forget, I now say to chat. GPT, okay, Don't let me forget these things. And I'm feeling I'm having one of those 4am moments, and it comes back with a whole schedule of things that I need to remember to do today and when to do them, and, like, puts my mind at rest. So, you know, I think it can be wrong. It isn't always the right thing, the right tool at the right time, but we're only two years in. This is like, you know, Netscape. And if we can all look back, or some of us can look back and remember what the internet was like, a terminal in the middle of the room? That's a sense, I think, you know,

Alastair Cole 18:46

okay, and in terms of that, that's, that's awesome. Thank you. In terms of a tip for salespeople, audience here, what would be your recommendation for salespeople.

Louise Ballard 19:03

So I think for salespeople. You know, there are many, many different tools that you can use as a salesperson, but start with, you know, if you haven't got a pro subscription of chatbot, that's the place to start, because actually, the cheap , free version isn't terribly safe. It is used to train their models. If you have the Pro version, you can feel confident, or more confident, as confident as you do with Instagram or or anything else to to use it and go with the knee, sign up for a configuration. We talk you through how to use that. And then, as I said, there will be a platform which will make it very simple and help you to work out how best to use it. But I think it is about experimentation. We all have day jobs. We don't have a lot of time. I mean, it is my day job. But I think if you go and you look, you start to put in some of your you know what? You have your information. And ask it to take that and digest it and repeat it to you, you'll start to build a confidence that it's going to be able to help you. And there's one quite fun tool, actually, which is Google has something called a notebook LLM, where you can upload your LinkedIn profile, big piece of work that you've done, perhaps it's your sales plan, and you have two hosts who talk about it, and you want you start to understand through that, and they make it really accessible, and then you start to understand the power of what's behind this and that as humans, if we can harness that power in our sales process, then you can start thinking in hectares. You can start thinking bigger , you can think about more people, but keeping your human feel to it, it shouldn't feel. It shouldn't be AI generated, and it doesn't have to be if you configure it and you make sure that you chat to it in a way that it starts to learn. You learn what you are, it will. It doesn't sound, it doesn't sound, AI generated. So this is the first step, I think, see it like, see it as the first step.

Alastair Cole 21:07

And I've found, as I've been moving through my own gears, that actually even doing something small, getting it repeatable and quality, well, that saved me, you know, 10 minutes, and then that time I'm investing into more so gradually, all of the things that I was doing manually, I'm kind of AI fixing All of them. And each one, yeah, is unlocking more time which I'm using, yeah, so it becomes more cumulative. Gartner recently suggested that sellers could generate an additional 27% bandwidth, from harnessing AI. And certainly it feels like that to me. It feels like, I mean, you know, we're building year long content marketing email newsletter plans over like two days, and then getting all the assets and stuff. There's lots of exciting things there. And so I'm not, not surprised, your sales group is you, you know, use, use AI for sales. There's loads of tools out there. Me, there's the, there's the paid platforms, you know, the paid version of chat, GPT. I've been playing recently with the mini high because it's more powerful logic. We've been playing with it with coding, trying to make basic HTML, things that previous versions weren't with. So there's a lot of stuff going there. I'm sure you've had a play with deep seek.

Louise Ballard 22:36

Yeah. Well, actually, funnily enough, it's interesting. I put something about this on LinkedIn last week. I have, but I feel like I represent most people in the room, you know, when I'm talking about AI, and because I'm a middle aged Mom, I'm not a techie, and I'm at the moment, and, you know, chat GPT have just come out with the year three, which is as cheap and as quick and as good. So I am going to stick with that, to be honest, because I am, trust is a big part of this. And this is where I think the sort of the big picture, the disconnect is where things get missed, is that for many people, trust and understanding, we've never had a technology that mimics a human . It's we, it's, it takes a bit of good beating your head round. So for me, at the moment, I'm leaving deep seek. I'm keeping an eye on it. I'll keep an eye on it for our clients and for everyone that we talk to. But I don't see any need to use it. I use chat. GPT. I love Claude. Claude, for deep work, I really enjoy it's also extra sort of, sort of secure. They have fabulous project areas where you can create, you know, different sales areas, for example, putting different information. That is fantastic, fantastic. And Gemini is getting better as well. Gemini is quite good. That's the Google one and then there's all the specialists. So we've been having a go with, hey Gen for video generation. We've, we've, we've done 11 labs for voices. We've done an avatar of me with a voice, which we're going to put on some little videos. And I think the point is, where is it important to be authentic as a human, and where is it important that it doesn't matter so much? And I think that's what we've got to move away from. And also, in the sales process, what are the things that's really important that you as a human do, and you make that connection with people, and that's going to become more important in an AI world, not less important. And what are the things that I can do that actually, it doesn't really matter who does it, or whether it's AI generated or not. And there's a lot of stuff in everybody's job that can be done, and it doesn't matter, and leaving you to spend more time talking to people. So I think that's my most important point,

Alastair Cole 24:44

yeah, that there are lots of little tools out there, and they're all there, kind of feels like there's a wave coming, and there's little specialists, and there's things you can add on, and on the side that they kind of the rich tapestry is flowing. Us, please. Yeah, it's, it's, it's really exciting. And from a sales point of view, what our we have a platform that's in this space, which is called revenue coach, which is an AI powered sales coaching platform for the price of a coffee, although it's currently free, we've got some very exciting features coming Louise, including using the QR codes there, if anybody wants it, including using AWS is poly text to voice service in order to create a personalized podcast, like a two minute pep talk that tells you which deal you need to go. And that's really exciting. That's coming down, down the line too. So we're excited about that. The revenue coach is still free at the moment. And you know, while I've got you here, you know, love your love your sales scoop, people should head over to Atheni.ai and, you know, check it out. Sign up, have a look at the platform, and get ready for the exciting new version. Yes, but what I've got you want to let you go without tapping you for some kind of founder insights, right? As an excited founder, life is hard for people now raising money and just generally as a founder. Now, have you got, have you got any tips, or a takeaway tip for founders who are struggling now, or something that kept you going.

Louise Ballard 26:27

I think in my first business, it was really interesting that someone said to me, when I was about three or four years in, and I actually sold a business at six, at six years old, and they said, make sure you're always ready to for an acquisition if that's what comes along and if that's what you want. And it may not be, but it actually changes your mindset somewhat to make sure that your scrappy business, however it is, is tight. And so everything from our legal contracts to our, you know, employment contracts to our accounting was tight, was super tight, so anyone could come along and in the end, then when I did say, Okay, I've now got three small children, and I'm actually it's time for me to move and do something different. I had three offers because I looked very professional before it even started. So that was my tip that I gave everyone, is make sure that you're ready. And then also, the second one, I think, for people now, is think big. Think big. Don't think small. Think big. We've got to, you know, if we want to compete on the world stage and whatever we do, we've got to think big. And that's what I'm doing as a 54 year old, middle aged woman who's come back into the workplace after some time off, I'm not going to take no for an answer. So think big and believe in yourself. Because, you know, we all wake up at four in the morning wondering how we're going to do the next thing, but that's normal, and there's lots of people around, so build that community

Alastair Cole 27:59

and and leverage AI, right to think big, leverage.ai

Louise Ballard 28:05

leverage that platform. Yes, we are. We are a small team. And what's really interesting in our fundraising process right now is trying to persuade people that actually we don't need that many more people to be able to do what we're doing. Okay, imagine that we actually don't need that much, because we are leveraging it to the hilt. Okay, so the whole business model, the whole future of the business model, is changing. So if you can keep up with that, and as a smaller business, particularly leap frog your older, your bigger competitors, because they can't move so fast, do it leverage? Ai,

Alastair Cole 28:36

totally. I mean, I've run, you know, big 600 person companies, and actually, I don't think for the revenue coach offering, we'd ever grow more than 10 people as a kind of a powered SaaS business. Louise, that's fantastic. Thank you. Great advice for founders generally. If anybody watching or listening is struggling as a founder themselves, they could download our latest white paper. It's just 12 pages short. It's called the Empowered founder. Seller, you can get that at our website, at the uplift partnership.com, or you can scan this QR code and download it. It is 100% focused, with 62 practical takeaways for founders to become more confident and empowered as a founder seller. Our next show is in a week. Today is back to Kieran Lai, and we're chatting through Louise seven things investors need to see in sales for they buy. So I'm you know might tap you up before then what your two or three might be. And if anybody is interested in the previous shows, they can head over to the sales scoop.com and watch previous recordings. That's it for today. Louise. Ballard, Louise, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Alice. Thanks for coming on and talking to us all about Atheni.ai. And I will be reposting and sharing. Bring your content and your mission in order to bridge that gap, that 90% gap that we've got in AI literacy, yeah,

Louise Ballard 30:09

and we're going to do it. We're going to do it. The government is on board. We're going to do it. So I think we need to make sure that everybody just shifts their mind to think, let's turn myself into that combine harvester.

Alastair Cole 30:19

Focus on the people and change that mindset. Okay, exactly. Thank you. Louise, thanks very much. Bye, bye, thank you.

Louise Ballard 30:26

Bye, bye, bye.