AI Moves From Experiment to the Enterprise

What is interesting here is how you guys is a venture firm, and an operating partner with the Port Coast are helping them do this, right. The Army, uh, to rent. Maybe just explain how it would work. Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having me and, uh, inside partners, venture capital and private equity firm based in New York. Uh, we're one of the leading firms investing in tech AI software of the last 30 years. And we're really proud of this scale. Right. So we've had, uh, over 600 companies. Um, and so that's allowed us to see some of the best practices in our portfolio. And so today, we're actually launching the industry's first forward deployed engineering council, made up with members from Microsoft, Databricks, uh, SAP, ServiceNow, uh, anthropic wonderful. Uh, which is one of our companies and others. So we're super excited to have these leaders get together to provide best practices not only to our companies, but to the rest of the industry. How much of setting this up is, is just an admission, really, that there are all sorts of companies that just haven't worked out yet what it is they can do with I know, I think you're spot on. I know IDC came out with a report, uh, earlier that 88% of all AI implementations have not gotten past the POC stage. Right? Unlike software where you implement it and it's ready to go, AI has endless possibilities. And so you're seeing the, uh, the addition of a lot of these roles for deployed engineers to really help you get the maximum value from I, um, I think this year alone, the top five platform companies spent over $9.5 billion building their own FTE teams, uh, to really help their customers see the value as well. I want to go to a case study, which I appreciate isn't isn't within the portfolio. But I'm thinking back to some of the reporting that we did around Cognition and Devin and like what people kept saying to me about cognition, it's traction, which you can measure is, are uh, or just the number of contracts it has. It is it was really good at getting into everyday companies. Call them fortune 500 companies, whatever. And just saying this is how you could use Devin and will help you do it. Um, back in summary, is kind of what you, you hope to do for your portfolio companies, right? Absolutely. I mean, the purpose of the for deployed engineer and sort of what Insight Partners is doing with their companies is helping them maximize the value of the solution, not just simply implement it. Right. So if you think about traditional professional services, you're consulting, uh, you implement the software. And the companies left basically doing the rest of the work with forward deployed engineers. They're they're embedded. They're measured on, uh, driving very clear outcomes. Um, and every single implementation and work that gets done gets fed back into the product. So the next, uh, forward deployed engineering, uh, initiative sort of compounds on what it's learned from other PhDs. It's very exciting. What is the the value proposition or the economics of taking in, um, PhDs, you know, is it something that would tip the balance of, of paying for a system or service? Is it an added layer of cost? Yeah. So we see it as an opportunity to actually expand, uh, the total addressable market for a company, right, versus just thinking about what the product could do out of the box. A lot of these for deployed engineers, because they're embedded working with the company, are looking to find other ways to streamline and automate a lot of the workflows that the company has. So it's really a compounding effect of not just the original solution, but of what's possible within the company. All right. You guys are kicking off your, uh, scale up conference, I think tomorrow. Uh, that's right, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So suits for it. What do you think people are going to be discussing and talking about right now? Yeah. No. So it's a great week for us again the forward deployed engineering council it goes off today. Tomorrow we have our scale up AI conference here in New York where we are bringing in leaders from across the globe, uh, experts on AI technology to really talk about trends. Uh, what's going on with the models? Uh, we have leaders from anthropic. Uh, the CRO president of Databricks will be there to talk about how they've scaled from 0 to 7 billion. Uh, and of course, the forward deployed engineering Council will be there to answer questions and share best practices. So really an exciting time not only for inside partners, but for the industry to just get a sense of how AI is transforming the industry. So so this is interesting. We're going to talk a little bit more about this with NEA later in the hour. You know, they're not necessarily mutually exclusive pacing the frontier of a model's capabilities versus the rate of deployment in the enterprise. Right. Like companies big and small, can just plough on with AI irrespective of what the Frontier Labs are doing. Like. Is that seem to be the general consensus among you, your partners? Your report goes. Yeah. So whether the frontier models slow down or speed up, I know we've seen a speed up in the, you know, in the past. I think there's, there's discussions on hey, if they slow down what happens. Uh, then you also have, um, you know, the open source models as well. Um, basically we're seeing a lot of momentum still in the portfolio specifically for Insight Partners, but also the industry, because we talked about the adoption sort of lagging, uh, earlier. There's still a lot of opportunity and momentum to get the maximum value out of AI. And that's why we're doubling down on the forward deployed engineering. Uh, council.