The Mid-Market Integration Sweet Spot
There may be errors in spelling, grammar, and accuracy in this machine-generated transcript.
Emily: Hey, guys.
Doug: Oh! We're back. Oh, we're back, baby. It's actually a fun one, so we'll get to our esteemed guest here in just a minute. Esteemed sporting all kinds of of fun. Uh, what do you call it? Swag. I guess that I don't even have here, which is great. So that's. That's perfect. We'll get into that in just just a minute. I do have a bone to pick with you on [00:00:30] that, Matt, because you were supposed to get me all of my most official, unofficial Sage Intacct podcast shirts.
Matt: You should have been at the conference. If you were at the conference, you would have gotten swag.
Doug: Okc, but I don't like when you turn it back on me. I don't like responsibility. I feel like we all know this at this point in my life.
Emily: Wait and I need to follow up. I got Sage shoes so I know the podcast listeners can't see them and I'm not holding them up, but they are Sage branded tennis shoes that I don't think Doug or Matt, either one of those guys have saved shoes.
Matt: I'm just gonna say I got a commitment [00:01:00] from somebody to send me them shoes, so. Wow.
Doug: Wait, so you're just gonna tell people I have shoes, but not show them?
Emily: Well, they won't be able to see. You'll see. Let me get them.
Doug: Perfect. Now we can do the podcast while she's gone here for a couple minutes. Uh, in the interim, though, while we're transitioning out, Emily's grabbing her shoes. Uh, Scott Hall, which we'll get into the pronunciation of your name, because you did correct me on that just a minute ago. And how you tell people to say it from Venn Technologies is here. Talk about everything. Integration, Sage Intacct, [00:01:30] how to make technology work, how to make money off of technology. Take your pick. We're gonna go down a lot of roads today, Scott. But, Scott, thank you for joining us. Now, please, can you just tell people briefly before we get back to Emily's shoes? Who are you? Who's Venn technology? And how do you tell people to pronounce your last name?
Scott: I mean, these are questions I ask myself every day. So, um, yeah. Scott Hall, um, I tell people, you walk down a hall and roar like a cheerleader hall roar. I started a company ten years ago called Venn Technology. We're based in the Dallas area. [00:02:00] We've been a part of the Sage Intacct ecosystem since. Since before it was the Sage Intacct ecosystem. Um, we, um, I told people that when we we started the company, it was, uh, Salesforce Consulting firm that did integration work. And over the years, just through doing more and more in the intacct space, we became an integration firm that does Salesforce work. So we we take the manual effort out of getting data across your business applications.
Doug: And of those applications. Of course. Sage Intacct is your favorite? [00:02:30]
Scott: Uh, of course.
Doug: Right. Absolutely. Because you're wearing.
Scott: Absolutely.
Doug: An unofficial Sage Intacct podcast shirt.
Scott: So I'm officially unofficial.
Doug: You are, you are that that is our tagline. Uh, and of course, the Venn hat, because we gotta gotta get the branding in there.
Scott: I, you know, we have a very relaxed culture in our office and you can't see it, but I'm actually wearing shorts and flip flops, and this is pretty typical attire. So I'm usually rocking a hat here at the office.
Doug: I feel like we've we've hit footwear quite a bit [00:03:00] already, and we're not three minutes into this, this episode, which is okay.
Scott: Let me let me clarify that my flip flops are not Sage flip flops.
Doug: They're not.
Scott: They're not, they're not.
Doug: No, no.
Scott: But maybe somebody needs to create those.
Doug: Louis Vuitton flip flops, I would imagine. Uh, Matt, just to round things out, what shoes are you wearing? I guess because that's apparently where we're going today.
Matt: Um, I have regular shoes on. I'm really exciting. I actually have some shoes I bought off Amazon for, like, 30 bucks.
Emily: Prime day special. [00:03:30]
Doug: Does this shoe have, like, a brand?
Matt: Brand? Bruno. Mark. And it's black. They're cloth, they're comfortable, but they work for professional and nonprofessional. I do have shorts on, too. Uh, Scott. So, hey, joining you in the in the relaxed mode of operating here.
Emily: Okay, everybody, this is the this is the podcast. It's all you're going to get listeners, uh, with shoes and wearing shorts or not.
Matt: And cheap shoes. On my side.
Emily: Cheap shoes.
Matt: Cheap shoes.
Doug: Sure. Sure. Cheap shoes. [00:04:00] What a storyteller, man. I gotta say, you really? You're selling those Amazon cheap shoes? Very hard.
Matt: I mean, I'll tell you what. I was in an airport one time. The guy comes up to me, he's like, I really like your shoes. I got a pair. Kind of like him. I was like, dude, those ones are expensive. He's like, yeah, they are. They're like a couple hundred bucks. I was like 35. He was like, what? I was like, hey, it's pretty good.
Doug: What a master you are.
Scott: While we're making, you know, confessions about the cheap, you know, clothing that we buy on Amazon, I have become obsessed [00:04:30] with these Amazon brand jeans that are like 30 or 35 bucks a pair when they fade just a little bit, I don't even care. I just go buy another pair and off we go.
Doug: Are they actually like Amazon Basic brand jeans or are they some offshoot Amazon essentials?
Matt: I think I have a pair.
Doug: Amazon. Yeah.
Scott: For a while I think that there was like a I want to say like Goodfellas or something like that was was the brand they operated under, but I don't know if they dropped it or not either way. 3035 bucks. Get the job done. Throw them away [00:05:00] when they fade.
Matt: I'm going with I think all this stuff is going up in price currently, but we won't go there.
Scott: I love my grocery bill.
Emily: You and you and Matt are CEOs of companies. And I love the cheap Amazon jeans and and shoes like this is great.
Matt: I've never been.
Scott: Splurges, but going cheap I guess allows me to splurge in other areas.
Matt: Exactly. So like he has he.
Doug: Has four super yachts, but he draws, he draws the line.
Scott: It's only three but sorry.
Doug: Three, [00:05:30] three. You lease the fourth. Yeah. You don't own the fourth. Yeah. Yeah. No, we've we've all been there. We've we've all been there. Scott. But. Emily. All right. You got your shoes. Now, for anyone watching and not just listening, let's let's show those bad boys off quickly. So we move on from the entire conversation.
Emily: Sage shoes, green laces and everything.
Matt: They're nice.
Doug: So, Scott, you've been with, uh, the Sage Intacct, uh, I'll call it kind of integration marketplace for a very long time now. Now, Emily, would you mind just giving everybody the 50 zero zero zero foot overview, [00:06:00] you know, of the marketplace partner concept again, how it's made up of roughly how many there are just kind of baseline stuff to work off of here.
Emily: Yeah. So, uh, Sage Intacct marketplace consists of over 300 plus marketplace partners. And these these are software companies that have integrations into Ntac. Maybe it's, um, a company like Bill.com or an expense solution like Expensify, or it's a Ben Technologies. Um, and they all have integrations into Sage Intacct [00:06:30] and provide an additional functionality.
Doug: Scott. What I want to kind of pass ball over to you here for a minute. Can you give us an idea? You know, obviously you are quasi agnostic in terms of the softwares that you implement and sell and help people work through here. Uh Sage Intacct. Of course, being a primary one, I would imagine, uh, one of the primary go tos on your end. Hand. So can you give us an overview of kind of the. Then I'll call it your ecosystem on your side, the type of clients you work with, industries you work with, any specific verticals that you know [00:07:00] inside and out. Are you the XYZ industry guys? You know what is kind of the flavor, the size and type of organizations that you really help through, kind of this whole technology selection and implementation process.
Scott: Yeah. So our business, 95% of everything that we do touches intact in in some way. And we are, um, trying to diversify a little bit and get into some other areas. But um, like I said, yeah, 95% or more of everything that we do touches [00:07:30] intact. And in terms of the verticals and the company size, really, because our business is so tethered to intact, it really follows the, the intact, um, you know, customer base. So I would say that the overwhelming majority of our customers are doing 20 to 200 million 200,000,000in revenue. We certainly have bigger ones. We certainly have smaller ones, particularly when it comes to to nonprofit in terms of geography, heavily concentrated in North America. But as Sage has taken intact abroad, we've started [00:08:00] picking up customers in Europe and Australia and a couple other parts of the globe, but heavily North America, heavily US focused and, um, you know, over the years it's been amazing to watch our customer base grow. And we've got this little, uh, Google map inside of our Salesforce environment and watching more and more pins pop up, uh, in places all over is Sage has grown and we've grown with them has been really, really exciting as far as the applications that we tend to work with, integrating [00:08:30] them into. Intacct, um, we've got a number of listings out on the marketplace for what I would call Productized integrations.
Scott: So we've got a, you know, for for some customers, it's a complete turnkey solution. For others, it's a, hey, we'll get you 85% of the way there, and then we can kind of tailor the rest. So we cover stripe, Shopify, HubSpot, Salesforce nonprofit. There's an up and coming nonprofit CRM called virtuous that we're starting to do a lot of integration with. We've got a utility for [00:09:00] when somebody doesn't have an application that has an API. We see this in healthcare some and a little bit with some older point of sale. They've got all these CSV files that they've got to export, do all kinds of mass manipulation to, and then pray and hope that when they imported it, it comes in the right way. We've got a tool that can take those CSV files and build mappings and transformations one time. And so they just dropped the file in and go. We take care of the rest. And then so so those are the ones that we're working with most commonly. But we get calls [00:09:30] every day from people that are using something that we've never heard of before, something we've never touched before. And as long as the APIs are there, I've got a team of really smart people that can get in and figure out how to get the data in and out.
Matt: So what kind of differentiates you guys from like an ipaa solution? Like solution. We've had data blend on before and so forth. I think there's a big, big difference between the two, but I'm not so sure that your common, uh, purchaser or client of yours would, would know necessarily what that what that real line in the sand is between the two. [00:10:00] Can you talk a little bit about that?
Scott: Yeah. So we are definitely ipass. And um, you know, this is the space that we play. And, you know, in terms of how we go to market, we do have some of these productized offerings, but we also really take a white glove turnkey approach. This isn't a hey, here's the tool. Um, here's here's some help docs, you know, good luck. Go. You know, go knock it out on your own. We're going to walk a customer all the way through, you know, the project and so [00:10:30] much of our, our, our deal flow is working alongside partners or people that work for Sage directly that are selling to end customers. And so we are very commonly coming alongside them in the sales cycle and helping them, you know, scope and, you know, make, make these integrations a part of that initial sale. And then working alongside the implementation team for the partner for Sage professional services to to, you know, work hand in glove to make sure that when we get on the other side that, you know, the not only is everything working [00:11:00] well within intact, but also that these integrations are working seamlessly like they're they're intended to.
Matt: Awesome. Yeah.
Emily: And I can I. Scott and his team has worked with one of my clients, um, on a pretty robust Salesforce integration. And I can really attest to like the work his team put in to make them feel comfortable in the integration.
Matt: Well, I was just about to go into something kind of similar to that. Emily Scott, one of the things that I think purchasers of Intacct, um, don't have a good understanding of is intact [00:11:30] sales, what's called the advanced CRM integration, which is a Salesforce integration, but it has its limitations. And with organizations that need more robust integration are using custom fields, things like that. They need services like what you provide from, uh, from a Salesforce integration. But I don't think that people really understand the why and where that kind of break point is within the, uh, within the two solutions. Um, and I think be really good to kind of dig into that if you, if you don't mind.
Scott: Yeah. Let me I'm going to give a [00:12:00] preamble before I get into some of the specifics. And um, for, for many years, I got to speak at the, the Intacct conference. It's obviously gone through a lot of name changes over the years, but, um, and in my presentation, I kind of laid out here are 3 or 4 different ways to approach integrating your systems. And the first one is what I would call packaged integrations. And I would put the advanced CRM connector in that category of packaged integrations. It it is made for a very specific use case. [00:12:30] It you know, it does this thing extremely well. And so, um, and then as far as the other kinds of integrations, we get into custom code. So what? A lot of people think of when they think integration. It's let's get developers and they're cranking out code in a text editor. And, you know, you get code you got to maintain, and then you've got IPAs and then you've got, to a lesser extent, RPA robotic process automation, which uses the user interface, um, to to go put, put data into the system as if a human were doing it. When I [00:13:00] think about how people need to approach their integrations, I will tell people every time, if there are packaged integrations out there, you owe it to yourself to evaluate whether or not that is going to meet your needs. The publisher is going to maintain that there will be updates and enhancements over time. And and if it fits your use case, then that is absolutely what you should do. And so over the years, we've actually done a lot of implementations of the advanced CRM connector, where partners didn't have the Salesforce expertise [00:13:30] and didn't want to do that on their own.
Scott: Let's maybe shift and talk about when does something, when does then get involved if the advanced CRM is not the right fit. So it's one of the few things. Um, Emily, without naming the client, I will say there in the legal space and in their case, they actually use this, um, overlay on top of Salesforce called edify. And it uses a lot of Salesforce standard objects, but it also has a ton of additional custom objects. [00:14:00] And I'll distinguish between custom objects and custom fields when when you introduce all these additional objects tables within the database, the advanced CRM connector isn't aware of those custom objects. And so a lot of kind of this decision tree comes down to, okay, how how customized is your Salesforce. And when you bring in something like Lithify, this legal app that sits on top of Salesforce, I would I would say that that's fairly custom. Um, and then also no two Salesforce environments are the [00:14:30] same. And so to the extent that somebody may be working off of opportunities and opportunity products, they may have done all kinds of other customizations, and we need to get data from other parts of the system. So, um, let me back up a little bit. First thing we need to do is take a look at what are the specific workflows that a package integration like advanced CRM handles. So if you need to integrate into the um order entry module or the contracts module, and more recently they've added the ability to integrate, uh, directly to the GL.
Scott: If [00:15:00] your use case is that, then we can continue to evaluate whether advanced serum is going to fit. So from there we have to look at what what objects are we getting data from in order to push into those areas of the system. And so when when you've got these customizations or when you've got this third party overlay, you know, that really kind of totally changes the game. And then another aspect that I'll mention where a package integration like advanced CRM is not going to be a good fit, is [00:15:30] going back to that workflow concept. We actually see a lot of need, particularly in nonprofit working with foundations, that there's actually an accounts payable workflow that needs to be managed. And a package connector like advanced CRM is not intended for that kind of a use case. So you see an organization that's using Salesforce not only to manage the money that's coming in, but in a grant making organization. They're using Salesforce to track the funds that are going out. And so we need to create a vendor. We need to create an AP bill when when accounting actually cuts that [00:16:00] check or sends that wire to the grantee, we need to write a record back to Salesforce to say, hey, you know this, much of this total grant has been paid. So there's there's not there's not necessarily a one size fits all. But those are the buckets that I think about it in. What are the workflows. Does it support the workflows. And if it does, does your customization and use of Salesforce support? You know, the the boundaries of what that that package tool is made to do?
Matt: Well, I really appreciate that. And it was kind of, [00:16:30] uh, selfish of me, but I've used different episodes, like when we had Avalara on here and in my scoping, and I'd be like, hey, go listen to this episode and then come back to me and tell me whether you think it's the right solution for you. So in my own way, this is what I'm going to do next time I'm scoping out an advanced CRM. Instead of going through my things like, look, it's a template. And, you know, here are the fields that we're dealing with. Talk to me a little bit about the information. I'm gonna say. Go listen to Scott talk on this episode. Here's the link. Come back [00:17:00] to me and tell me whether you think the advanced CRM will work for you.
Doug: You heard it there, Scott. Send him a bill for consulting.
Emily: Yeah, there it is.
Doug: Yours. New. Yours. New sales rep. You don't even know it.
Matt: And now I bet you.
Scott: Yeah. And we're happy to get on a call and help, you know, further evaluate those kinds of things with you, too.
Doug: Scott. I want to that all kind of just I love touching on this topic with everyone who sees a lot of different organizations, how they operate, how they function, how they transform from a technological backbone off the top [00:17:30] of your head. Can you tell me just what is the most primitive operation you've seen of a very successful business that you either had to walk away from because you just couldn't help? They were too far gone, or you helped pull them through. You know, I mean, like, someone is just, like, not a disaster, but a shockingly successful organization that was just so primitive in how they operated from a technological standpoint that it just you lost sleep over it.
Scott: I actually probably a month or [00:18:00] two ago wrote a blog post on this exact thing. Um, sometimes when we're if we get into our first couple of scoping calls with a, with a prospect, if, if we can't get a really good handle on what it is they need and what we need to do for them within a couple of of, you know, one hour phone calls, we'll do a discovery engagement with them and a paid engagement. But it's, hey, we're going to come on site for 2 or 3 days. We're going to really, you know, spend [00:18:30] spend time locking ourselves in a conference room and drawing on a whiteboard and, you know, walking through all of your, your, your workflows and your systems and your operations. And so this was many, many, many years ago. This was probably in my first or second year in business. We got brought into a company that was based in Las Vegas. They're in the gaming world, and their business was very, very complex. They would have arrangements with retailers and and hotels and restaurants to put, [00:19:00] uh, you know, video poker or slot machines in these different facilities. And they had all kinds of different arrangements. Some of them were rev share arrangements. Some of it was rental, you know, and then from there it was who's responsible for maintenance on this? And, you know, all this stuff, it was very, very complicated.
Scott: They had multiple warehouses full of equipment that they had to, you know, check in, check out. Everything's serialized. And and then you get into their sales process and, you know, there was there was a lot of a lot of moving parts and pieces on [00:19:30] my first day on site. This wonderful, sweet lady starts walking me through this massive web of spreadsheets, and she would copy and paste something from one sheet to the next to the next, then copy that, put it in an email, send it off to this person. And that really was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what she showed me. And and I made a face at one point and she looked at me and she's like, [00:20:00] what? What's that face? And I said to her, I don't know how you're still here. Like, I don't know how you are doing this. This is like the most painful thing I've ever seen. Well, fast forward, we complete our on site, and, um, you know, a couple of weeks go by and I put together my findings and recommendations, and here's the scope. And I sent an email to her to schedule a call to talk about it, and I get a bounce back [00:20:30] that this email address is no longer valid. And she just decided one day that she'd had enough and up and left.
Emily: Oh.
Scott: So, um, you know, I certainly not what I would have wanted to see and, you know, would have loved to seen that organization pick up and run. And I think we could have completely revolutionized how a lot of their operations functioned, but unfortunately didn't even get that far because things were just so far gone that this critical link in the chain was like, nope, I'm out. They [00:21:00] broke.
Doug: So the entire internal bookkeeping was done essentially in Excel. Is that kind of what.
Scott: I, the people that I was working with were, um, part of accounting, but, um, they were there were all these other operational aspects that were going to flow into accounting, and that was really where our focus was, um, I think that they were coming off of QuickBooks and moving on to intact, But, um, we didn't even, you know, didn't even get that far to be able to connect anything in.
Doug: And [00:21:30] were they doing well, from what you could tell financially. I mean, they were making money doing well.
Scott: They appeared to be printing money hand over fist.
Doug: In the gaming industry. I don't know who would have seen that coming. That's that's weird. It's bizarre that that's that's how it works.
Emily: I think we all have, you know, those crazy, you know, off the wall stories. So, um, you know, that sounds kind of similar to to one of mine. So I guess you never know what people are doing behind [00:22:00] the scenes.
Scott: The title of my blog post and really the the intention behind writing it was not to, you know, shine a light on this particular situation, but to say that automation is actually an employee retention mechanism. And, you know, if, if, if your people are having to go through all these mind numbing processes to do their job, eventually they're going to leave. And so let's come in. Let's automate these things. Let's let's make it so that they want to come into work. [00:22:30] And they can focus on higher value things that they were actually hired to do. Not this mind numbing, you know, copying and pasting of data across a maze of spreadsheets.
Doug: So that's kind of that extreme example, right? But you work with a lot of entities. You implement a lot of software programs. You help people transform pretty significantly across the board. What are some of the more common ones? I'll call it when you come in and scope a client or have that discovery call or meeting with a client. What [00:23:00] are some of the common challenges you really see that are more like broad strokes from entities that have tried to do it themselves, essentially, and then realize, maybe we need to bring in a professional. Are there any kind of commonalities you see amongst those like, oh, we really screwed this up. Like someone who tries someone with no construction experience that tries to build a deck or something like that, you know, what are the kind of common themes that you do see across multiple entities?
Scott: Yeah, the common themes are, hey, we've got some line of business application [00:23:30] that is upstream of intact. And there's a high volume of transactions that need to come through. And to be honest with you, a lot of people that we talk to don't even know where to begin. And so that's that's when they reach out to us or, you know, they, they see we, we use intact and we have this other application and oh, there's this, you know, there's this pre-built, uh, integration for it. Um, you know, [00:24:00] let's go and investigate that. You know, if if you've got something that you do, like twice a year and yeah, it's a pain and maybe it's a lot of transactions, that's not the sort of thing that's worth putting the, the investment into integrating. But when you have those things that are happening daily, weekly, monthly that are high volume, That's where it makes sense to. To get us brought in. And so where, where, where people are typically at before we get involved, is there either hand keying this [00:24:30] data or they're doing the export they're having to manipulate, and then they're praying and hoping that when they import that it comes in. Right. And, um, we we worked with an organization many, many years ago, and they didn't want to fully automate it.
Scott: They they wanted to continue the export process. And so we worked with them to build some, some structure in Salesforce so that they could export these things. And I remember I warned them, hey guys, listen, I know you say you don't want to fully automate this, but when [00:25:00] when Sally is out and Joe is is working, make sure that when Sally comes back, she knows if Joe imported the records, because if not, you're going to run into an issue. Well, about two weeks after we launched this thing and showed them how to use it, we get the call. Hey, well, you know, we had that situation. Sally was out. Joe did the import and Sally came back and imported again. And now we've got spaghetti because we've got all these duplicate entries. And so we we help people reduce [00:25:30] error. And by automating these things, we're able to help them have much more timely visibility into their data across systems. And so that that leads to a faster close that leads to a cleaner audit. You know, part of what we do when we build these integrations is we've got these audit fields that we build in, and you can follow the trail to see here's how this record got created.
Scott: And here's here's the timestamp, and here's the job in our ipus that, that that did the integration. [00:26:00] Maybe taken a slightly different bent on this. If I can, I'd love to share the most rewarding story of all these years. We this is probably 2017, 2018. We had just started working with an outside marketing agency and they said, hey Scott, we we need to do some case studies. Um, so talk to some of your customers and see if they'd be willing to do an interview. And we had just wrapped up a project for an organization that runs some [00:26:30] faith based summer camps, and they had Authorize.net intact and Salesforce, and they had this just awful process of having to reconcile things across all these different systems. And they had no clear path to to how to make this happen. And so we came in and we made it just work flawlessly. And I ran into my main point of contact at a conference and I said, hey, we're we're getting ready to do these case studies. Would you be willing [00:27:00] to do an interview and let us write about what we did for your organization? And his body language completely changed. And I'm like, oh, no, I thought this went so well. What? What happened?
Doug: You got into a fist fight. That's. Well, it seems it seems like you're building up to this. Like we just started swinging. You know, you spent three days in jail.
Scott: Yeah, yeah, yeah, something like that. So, um, he he he turns to me and he says, Scott, the money we spent with you. And I'm like, oh, geez. If he's like, if he's coming out of the gate with [00:27:30] money, like, this cannot be good. Scott, the money that we spent with you was a drop in the bucket in terms of what we are going to save. I am now able to repurpose an entire full time employee to go do other things. And because of that, I can send more kids to camp on scholarship. One of our one of our core values. And we have six core values. One of our core values is rewarding work and working. Uh, prior to starting then, I, the [00:28:00] organization I was with, we were working with more and more enterprise type customers, and you just didn't feel the impact of the work that you were doing with these really large organizations. But when you work in the mid-market, you can see the impact of what you do. And that just brings me so, so much joy. So hearing this guy say, Scott, because of what you did, I can send more kids to camp and we can we can be much more on mission because of that. It [00:28:30] doesn't get better than that. So there's there's all kinds of really, really great, rewarding stories.
Doug: Is that also the day where you decided to double your fees across the board moving forward? Because maybe even triple, I don't know.
Scott: Maybe I should have.
Doug: Yeah, that's a that's a sign if you've ever got one before. But a lot of lot of discussion around like automation and all this fun stuff and implementation, all these integrations and everything, there's this little thing floating around. Some people are talking about it occasionally A.I., artificial intelligence.
Emily: There's [00:29:00] a whole podcast like talking about AI automation. Let's be clear.
Doug: What can you give us? Kind of the the the flyover? Scott, on your thoughts on the role of artificial intelligence in a lot of these automations that you work with, because some people are extreme on both ends of the spectrum. You know, this is this is going to cause everything to go to hell or this is the best thing since sliced bread. What are your thoughts on it? I mean, from like real world implementations that you've been a part of and continue to be a part [00:29:30] of? I'm sure this conversation comes up quite a bit. Good. Bad. Ugly. What do you think.
Scott: Man? Um, this this could be. This could be a long conversation. I'll try to condense it as much as possible. I'll give you kind of my personal, like, super high level thought. I constantly vacillate between being bullish and bearish on AI. And and here's here's kind of where I'm at. And I imagine that some of y'all have had similar experiences. There are things that I have [00:30:00] used AI tools to do that I have been absolutely blown away by. And there have been other things that I'm like, this is so simple, how could you mess it up that bad? And so, um, you know, I think that that somewhat that speaks to trust that that goes into whether or not we do these things. Um, one of the things that I feel like is holding AI back is that AI is so big and it can do anything, but [00:30:30] we're paralyzed because we don't know what to do. So so we do nothing. And until there are very specific use cases, I think it's going to be really hard to get AI adoption. And we're getting a little bit more and a little bit more, you know, with each with each week.
Scott: Um, so I think that it's going to take a while for AI to truly become this [00:31:00] panacea that that we're all expecting it to be. I think it's several years out and it's going to be incremental improvements that that get us there. And again, it's going to have to be these laser focused kinds of things. Um, like y'all, I'm, I'm talking with other partners, other people in our space and in adjacent spaces on a regular basis. And when I'm talking with other people in the integration space or other people in the Salesforce space, pretty much every conversation I have, [00:31:30] I'm asking them, what are what are you doing with AI? What are your clients asking for? And the response is almost universally, you know, our clients really aren't bringing us stuff that they want us to do with it. And so I think that until we have a really until we have a lot better sense for how we want to use it, it's just going to be something cool.
Doug: That message needs to be delivered to many marketing teams right now. [00:32:00]
Emily: We need that on a t shirt.
Doug: Yes, everything's AI enabled right now. It's amazing. By AI enabled blender. Why do I need that?
Scott: I honestly I'm but.
Emily: In you know, sales cycles. We do have folks asking about AI but it's in very small areas like AP automation, GL, outlier detection. It's not you know, overall. And of course Sage is doing their thing with Sage Copilot. Um, I've seen, you know, bits and pieces of that.
Scott: And so like Emily, those those are the kinds of things [00:32:30] like what they're doing with copilot. It's those specific use cases that I think are going to be incredibly helpful. The idea of natural language reporting or natural language queries has been around for a really long time. And we're we're this close to being there, if not already there. I mean, the the ability just to say, um, you know, show me my top ten, um, outstanding customers right now. Like, who owes me the most money and not have to actually [00:33:00] go in and go into the accounts receivable and, you know, build a report and add all of your filters that that will be huge. And so it's going to be more and more and more of those kinds of things that I think are going to propel AI forward and drive adoption. I'll give you something. We internally recently just implemented a sales tool called Air Cover, and it's this little app that rides shotgun in your zoom calls or teams or whatever you use, and [00:33:30] it can provide real time coaching to your sales reps. So if somebody mentions a competitor, it automatically surfaces a battlecard. And as you're asking your sales qualification questions, it you tell it. Here's our sales methodology and its mapping those responses and being able to take and put that back into Salesforce so that the salespeople don't have to actually go in and fill that out on on their opportunities. And then at a macro level, over time, you've obviously got to give it enough [00:34:00] data for it to become useful, but over time it's able to provide macro level coaching across the organization. Say more of this, say less of this. And so this is one of those, you know, very focused use cases where I think AI is going to be, you know, really, really helpful. But we need more and more of those kinds of things.
Matt: I know everybody's talking about AI and that being the future, but if we just like, take a step back and look at the integration industry and just if I, if I look at it [00:34:30] and how much it's grown over the last ten years, where do you see sort of that evolution of your industry that you sit in right now? Uh, in the next, say, five years?
Scott: Yeah. So y'all all know Aaron Harris. Anybody listening to the podcast, I assume, knows Aaron Harris. He's the the CTO of Sage and one of the founders of intact. We we actually did a webinar with him on AI earlier this year. And one of the things he talked about was how Ipass [00:35:00] is very well positioned to capitalize on AI because AI needs data to to be able to really function. And so I think that the the natural progression is for agents to evolve through ipaas solutions. But and there's there's plenty of people out here that are doing that. But again, it's, it's what are those specific use cases that you want to employ an agent to do that, [00:35:30] that you've got to have that figured out for it to become valuable.
Matt: So so do you see the future of integration? I passed to be very AI centric, or do you see other aspects of of how the industry is going to evolve, uh, moving forward?
Scott: Yeah, I mean, I think it'll certainly be, uh, more and more AI centric in areas where, um, you know, talk a little bit about what we're seeing. I talked earlier about how we've got a number of, of applications that we [00:36:00] integrate with on a regular basis, but we get phone calls all the time from people that say, hey, you know, I need you to connect something new. Well, we've got the ability now to go quickly, build up a service connector to a. Net new application just by taking the API documentation for that application, running it through an AI process. And boom, we've got a solution in our tool to be able to go integrate with that thing that we've never touched before. We've got tooling to auto generate documentation [00:36:30] that says, okay, here's here's these workflows that you've built out in the past. Click a button, boom. Here's here's a document that you can give somebody in plain English that says, here's here's what this thing is doing. And so some of those things I think are more game changing than, than others. And it's it's going to be, I think the slow iterative kind of build to, to get to, you know, something that truly is game changing.
Matt: Another question I had around IPAs [00:37:00] in general, and I know every company is different because people are what create differentiators. But as a platform, if I look at your IPAs versus any other one, are there specific foundational differences in how Éparses operate, and is that something that a consumer would, uh, would have value in understanding?
Scott: Yeah. So I think what that a lot of it comes down to who is the one that's actually going to be building in the ipass. [00:37:30] And while we can certainly give our, our customers access to be able to go and build on their own, a lot of times why they're bringing us in in the first place is they just want it done for them. They want that turnkey. They want that white glove. Generally speaking, you know, functionality from my past to IPAs is generally the same. You're going to have, you know, this this application and this application that you need to move data between. You're going to set some sort of trigger, whether it's a, you know, something that happens on a record or it's, [00:38:00] you know, time based or whatever. And when that that condition is met, go do these things from from IPAs to IPAs. You're going to have varying levels of robustness when it comes to the kinds of transformations and the functions that you can use in those transformations to to make the data work in the receiving system. And, you know, some, some bypasses are, are targeted way, way, way up market and are priced at a point that aren't a good fit for the typical Sage [00:38:30] Intacct customer. And then you've got some really low end tools that yeah, if you just need some very, very rudimentary kind of stuff, we just need to sink our customer master with some other app. It can do that. But when it gets into a lot of the heavy transactional stuff and there is a lot of, um, a lot of transformation of the data that needs to take place. They just don't have the, the, the robustness to be able to handle that. And so we're we're bringing to the to the mid market. A tool that is [00:39:00] appropriately priced and has the feature set that people need.
Doug: And just for, just for for giggles here, Scott, can you define what you view as the mid market from a size perspective?
Scott: Yeah I this comes up a lot because everybody thinks of mid market a little bit different. For for us the way that we think about it is there are companies that are typically doing 20 to 200,000,000in revenue. And um, you know, again aligns pretty well with Intacct. You're definitely going to have bigger you're definitely going to have smaller. But for for [00:39:30] us, when we think of mid market, 20 to 200 million is is kind of where where we see that.
Doug: Yeah. That's that's fair. I just always like clarifying because like you said everyone has a bit of a different flavor on how they define what the market segment really is. One thing I usually have attention span of a gnat, so I forget things very quickly. Scott but something's been sticking with me. Talk about, you know, circling back to artificial intelligence, you know, you've seen some phenomenal use cases talked about like copilot with Sage, and I believe it was flyover or fly by with Zoom. I can't recall the exact name.
Scott: Air cover, air [00:40:00] cover.
Doug: Sorry. It is.
Emily: Really.
Doug: You know, again, we got the great example from you. What was the example or examples that you've seen where. Wow, this was a simple task that AI just took and butchered. Absolutely butchered.
Scott: You know, thankfully they're the things that I've been ultimate I've been utterly disappointed in are like low consequence kinds of things. Um, so I'll give you [00:40:30] a couple, um, I've got my little side button on my iPhone program so that I can push it, and then I can launch a voice conversation with ChatGPT, and I'll find myself in the car wanting to explore a variety of topics. And I just got done listening to a podcast on Microsoft. And I was I was curious how Microsoft's market cap compared with several other companies. And so I launched my little voice chat and I asked, okay, what is Microsoft's market cap? And it came back. And let's [00:41:00] just for sake of the story, say, okay, that sounds about right. And then I said, What's Apple's market cap? And I know for a fact that Apple has more cash on hand than what it came to, what it told me their market cap was. And so that was a that was an example where that that data is readily available. Those SEC filings are out there. You know, this is updated. That should have been a slam dunk. You know, spot on accurate kind of a thing. So again [00:41:30] the stakes are low. If I'm if I'm driving in my car and I'm having this voice chat with ChatGPT, no big deal if it's wrong. But take that forward into my business. Okay. I've really got to validate what we're what we're going to put in front of a customer or put in front of a prospect or you know what we're going to publish on our website. If we're going to use AI, it has to be right.
Emily: That's funny. So, uh, [00:42:00] one of my good friends, she works with a lot of, like between the ages of 17 and I would say 24. And she was telling me she's like, do you know how like this this group of people works with AI? And I was like, like, no, but like, tell me. She says they use ChatGPT like Google. Whatever ChatGPT says. The answer is that that's the answer, and they're not doing any more research.
Scott: Yeah. I there's, um, I've seen [00:42:30] a number of headlines in the last probably 6 or 8 weeks where the, the headline is some variety of AI is making us dumber. And I think that's a great example where people aren't they're just taking something as gospel. They're not running it through their own critical thinking to say, does that sound right? Um, and and and just running with it, it's it's.
Matt: Or even go to the next step with ChatGPT where it gives sources and click on the sources, see where it's pulling the data from, [00:43:00] because that has as big an impact of what you're getting as, as the information. So if if it's coming from sources that you don't trust, you can actually tell it to pull from different sources.
Scott: I so, um, last Friday we were doing some research on, um, kind of some market expansion, and I, um, I've got a paid ChatGPT subscription, and I will use the deep research functionality periodically and [00:43:30] give it a pretty lengthy prompt. And one of the things I said was, give me the top, give me a list of 100 partners in this space and the the there should be a table and it should have a column that has their name, their website, their approximate size and a brief description. Some of the rows in that table. I'm pretty sure it made up the name of the company, and in one of them I swear it said something like [00:44:00] need to verify this is a real company. So it was it was a little bit comical when, uh, when, when we started scrolling through that. That being said, a lot of other areas of this, this research output were very valuable and it would have taken me, you know, hours upon hours, if not days to, to get to where they did.
Doug: A lot of this conversation just reminded me of that early, early, mid, maybe mid 2000. S movie might be a deep cut for some people, but Idiocracy. Do you guys remember that [00:44:30] one?
Scott: I didn't see that one.
Doug: Oh, it's worth a watch because it was a satire at the time. And uh, based on what you just said, Emily, uh, were barreling towards a reality with within the near future of this, this movie becoming true. Worth a watch for anybody who hasn't seen Idiocracy. I think it's like the mid 2000.
Scott: Is this the one where everybody's wearing Crocs?
Doug: Uh. Wouldn't surprise me if they were wearing Crocs. Uh, basically, the premise of the movie is, uh, a mid-level intelligence guy from [00:45:00] the current time, uh, gets frozen or something by accident and thrown into the, you know, years and years and years into the future where the entire, like, society is, like, collapsed and everybody is just an idiot. Uh, hence Idiocracy. Uh, so this man at, like, the mid-level intelligence is immediately catapulted to the smartest person in the world. So it's a very interesting. It's it's a stupid watch. It's not a great movie, I can promise anybody, but it's worth a watch just to really see, uh, kind of touching on artificial intelligence taking over and not being [00:45:30] accurate and people not being able to think critically and do all this fun stuff. It's worth a watch if you have like, an hour and a half to waste of your life.
Matt: So do you see the person that like proposed to ChatGPT?
Scott: Oh my gosh. How?
Emily: Oh, yeah. Yes.
Scott: This is tragic. I mean, this is truly sad.
Doug: Yes. All of you really need to watch this movie. Then if you think that that is that is out of the question. Yeah.
Scott: Well, do yourself a favor sometime later today, go and Google Crocs. Idiocracy. There's [00:46:00] there's a story. I haven't seen the movie, but I read an article recently about, uh, about Crocs and Idiocracy. It'll it'll give you a chuckle.
Doug: I will actually have to go rewatch that now. I haven't thought about that movie in quite some time, but this is just it's bringing up memories of that great stuff. Uh, it's got to kind of circle circle back and around this whole thing up. I'll put a little pressure on you if it's all right. And you seem like a guy who's going to take on this challenge, you know, to end every single one of these episodes. We do somebody. Most of the time, it's unfortunate he has to tell. [00:46:30] Just a terrible dad joke. Now, you strike me as someone who has a couple awful dad jokes on standby.
Scott: So I love dad jokes. And at Venn, we have a standing Monday morning all hands meeting. It's really short and I start every week off with a dad joke, and I get a lot of groans and eye rolls and occasionally a belly laugh, which always makes me happy. So, um, this one actually comes courtesy of my 11 year old son, Knox. [00:47:00] So shout out Knox. Um, what do you call a late night talk show host that's lost his balance?
Doug: Late night talk show host who's lost his balance? An unsteady eddy, I, I cannot I'm thinking I'm thinking, um. Dan. Matt, Emily. Any any support here?
Emily: Anything a sit down comedian?
Doug: Oh, that's a good answer, though.
Scott: That's [00:47:30] good.
Matt: That's probably your best answer ever, Emily.
Emily: I know, probably that was it.
Doug: What do we got? Scott.
Scott: It's Jimmy Fallon.
Speaker5: Oh, okay. Okay, that one works on two levels.
Scott: When my when my 11 year old told me that joke the other day, I was rolling.
Speaker6: Where did you get that one from?
Scott: I don't.
Speaker6: Know. Good one.
Scott: Yeah.
Doug: It fits the setup and we all want it to happen in real life, so it's perfect.
Scott: I actually, I really like Jimmy [00:48:00] Fallon. I don't want I don't want to see that guy falling down.
Doug: Well, you know, you might want to have a talk with your son about that because he got it from somewhere. So I don't know where it came from, but. Scott, Ben, technology, thank you for joining us, my friend. Hopefully we can have you back in the future and actually see how accurate any of this conversation was at any given point in time. In the interim, though, I do challenge you. Please go watch Idiocracy. I think you'd enjoy it based on the discussion. Thank you for coming on. And we look to have, uh, look forward to having you on in the future again, Scott.
Scott: Thanks, guys, I appreciate it.
Matt: Thank you, thank [00:48:30] you.
