Embracing AI to Drive Go-to-Market Innovation
Hear from PROS Chief Revenue Officer, Todd McNabb, about how organizations can embrace AI to drive go-to-market innovation. Todd highlights how most companies are striving to increase revenue, improve profitability, and create competitive differentiation in their offers. Watch this session to learn how:
- PROS is for everyone
- PROS AI unlocks “outperformance”
- PROS Partners make it happen
Full Transcript
Please note that this transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors. We apologize for any inaccuracies.
Emcee: Please welcome your Chief Revenue Officer at PROS, Todd McNabb.
[music plays]
Todd McNabb: Wow. The energy over the last couple days has been awesome. It's great to meet so many of you, our customers and our partners. Just going through either it's the Innovation Center, the breakout rooms, or the one-on-ones. It's been great, you know, and I want to, wanna before I get started, say thank you, right? Thank you to all of you that have helped build on the PROS platform, been innovators and pioneers along the way with PROS. You heard, I'll talk about it in just a few minutes. This is my 30th day. So, but what I did here and what was really great is this is the most attended, outperform in the history. So thank you very much....
[applause]
Todd McNabb: We really couldn't have done this without all of you. And as I said, this is my first outperform. So over the next several weeks and days and months and even years, I look forward to those that I didn't get a chance or an opportunity to meet, but seeing you either in your office or your home office or seeing you out in the in the field or in the world somewhere. So I look forward to it. You know, you remember, I do, do you guys remember yesterday, Andres talked about that dream job that he put up? Does anybody remember that? No. One person, two people. All right, well, I accepted the job that he put up there, right? And as you said, today's day 30. So it's always great on day 30 to come in and know that you're doing a keynote, right? 'cause that's always a great thing. But I joined the company because of the outcome.
Todd McNabb: When I saw this, I said, what are the outcomes this platform can deliver? And it was there, the vision that the entire team, our product team, our offering team, our sales, our marketing, and our executive team shared for the future. And what I've seen here is really our customer first culture. How much our customers and our partners mean to us.
Todd McNabb: And really, AI, as we talk about a lot, and I'm gonna get into that, is really become the foundation of what we do here at PROS. And, you know, these 30 days, you know, even though I'm up on a main stage, get to see the, got to meet with the board, I got to spend time doing our earnings release. Got to do a lot of things, but it's been awesome. It really has. This has been awesome. And what I heard, there's a couple key things. We all, everybody in this room right, wants to increase revenue, right? Improve your profitability, right? And have competitive differentiation in your offerings. If I miss something, let me know, but I think those are kind of the three, how do I make money? How do we get more profitable? And how do I make myself more competitive so people can see me?
Todd McNabb: Those are the three things. We have an outcome based platform backed by really our AI innovation. And what you'll hear me talk about is this robust partner ecosystem that we're bringing to you right around the world. You hear me talk a lot about outcomes, right? What is the platform that PROS delivers? What are those financial outcomes that benefits to you, your customers, right? And every single person in your organization will benefit from PROS, whether that's sales, marketing, finance, procurement, everyone in your organization can benefit from the platform. Our, our PROS platform. Now, the AI innovation that in the PROS platform has helped drive revenue growth. You heard about it from a number of our customers yesterday. And we will aggressively continue to expand this ecosystem with our partners to help you.
Todd McNabb: And one of them that I've worked with for a very long time, I think over probably the last 10 years will be joining me on stage. So all of that, we talk about outcomes, outcomes, outcomes, right? So let's talk about how great outcome, how we're gonna deliver great outcomes for everybody in your business. You'll hear me continue to talk about this. As you heard yesterday, when you visit our homepage, it's, you'll see the headline, the CFO's Best Kept Secret for Profitable Growth. And the truth is everyone's gonna know about what PROS is doing, right? All kind of customers, whether that's a CMO, the CPO, CEO, and all of you in the room are gonna benefit from the power of PROS. It's the outcome, the financial outcomes that we're leveraging to help drive your business and fuel your business for growth.
Todd McNabb: In fact when I asked this, many of you guys told me about this yesterday.
[video playback]
[applause]
Todd McNabb: So it's great to hear so many of you share your stories about the competitive advantage PROS has. I met with, I got the opportunity not only in 30 days to meet with our board investors, but also a lot of our financial analysts. And more importantly, I got to meet with a number of you in this room. And they all shared the outcomes. You all shared the outcomes you were delivering with PROS and what we could be continuing to enhance for you, whether it was margin improvement, efficiency gains, right, or revenue uplift. You all all are achieving it with the power of PROS, just like we heard from HP yesterday, right? And Graybar who improve margins by 10% by using the PROS platform.
Todd McNabb: Now here's, another interesting fact. The our team gave this to me as I came on board and [laughter], they said, you know what, in less than nine months, right, you can fuel other AI investments or investments altogether to grow your margins and revenue through the power of PROS. And I looked at them and I said, that's not, there's no way we can do it in nine months. So they lined up a bunch of case studies for me and I said, let me talk to a few customers. And you heard yesterday a number of customers share this, right? Share their stories and where they're re innovating. In fact in this Forrester study concluded like late last year, their analysis showed that 400% ROI in just three years, that's a big number.
Todd McNabb: Again, let me see the data, but we validated it and it, what it, what we saw is it allowing you to continue those investments like we saw with Turkish Airlines yesterday. You heard the story at a hundred plus projects that they were reinvesting in as talk, when we talk about AI. Now there's 67 customers in our innovation center that are sharing these stories. So my challenge to each of you, if you haven't shared your story in our innovation center and get signed up please do right? Share your story where PROS is helping where we can continue to enhance our capabilities. That helps us and it also helps everyone in this room.
Todd McNabb: Okay? I wanna talk, before we move on to go. So make sure you go to the Innovation Center, get sign up and please tell your story 'cause it was great to hear these, this term AI that we've been talking about for over the last several days and really last several years, probably. They're two big letters right now, and they get used a lot, right? In fact, it's so big. Companies are even adding.ai to the end of their company.
[laughter]
Todd McNabb: But, but there's so many different kinds of AI. I mean, machine learning, descriptive analytics, deep learning, explainable AI, right? But what I, what I've been hearing over the last four or five years is really what can it do for my business and what outcomes will it create, right? How will the PROS platform now help me in improve revenue and profitability, create new market offerings, or deliver really a personalized customer experience? And ultimately, no pun intended, how will it help me outperform? So there's kind of three key things. When you talk about AI that we have built into the PROS platform. How accurate is it? How fast is it? And most importantly, can I really trust it, right? Can I really, really trust AI, right? And the AI that we're embedding in our platform. Can I trust the PROS platform with the AI embedded into it? Well, I'm gonna answer all three and I love your feedback, accuracy. So accuracy, the algorithms in our platform, self-learn and update, on a continuous basis for precision, right? This allows us right, to keep our guidance forecasting and pricing recommendations accurate, even when the market conditions are changing.
Todd McNabb: Take our customer airBaltic, are they in a room that may be down at the innovation center? It's probably down at the innovation center, but go see them. They just implemented dynamic ancillary pricing solution, our dynamic ancillary pricing solution. And in just three months, three months, they increased seat revenue by 6%. Top line growth, bottom line efficiency, right? Accuracy is great, but then you gotta talk about speed, right? If you provide an accurate quote, think about this. And I'd love to get your feedback here. If you provide an accurate quote faster than your competition, you're 30 to 50% more likely to win. In fact, if you respond five, within five minutes, your conversion rates are eight times greater. Now, we've engineered our platform to drive the most accurate results in real time. So our real time pricing engine delivers personalized dynamic price calculations in millisecond with subsecond response times. Now you can compare that to anybody else in the industry.
Todd McNabb: And I was with a manufacturer yesterday, didn't get the name approved, but they shared with me that they reduced quotation times by 98% for their services and by 65% for their configured products. And this automation here was the big thing. This here was the really surprising thing when they told me about this yesterday, is it reduced human error by 80% through the PROS platform. So speed and accuracy. Now we gotta talk about trust, right? They're all important, but it's, to me, any relationship, including the relationship we share with our customers and our, our partners trust is paramount, right? How do I trust the data? How do I trust AI?
Todd McNabb: And you heard yesterday, we use the explainable AI algorithms to make our AI more transparent in something you can trust. And I would encourage you to go see this over in our innovation center right after this. And research from Harvard Business Review in Deloitte shows that trusted companies outperform others by 200% of total market value. So we talk about top line growth, bottom line efficiency. How does PROS help you grow your revenue? Create profitable, get, get a profitable offering out there through speed, trust, and accuracy. But there's one other thing you need is scale, right? Any vendor can make a small model work, right? But in order to make it work for a trillion transactions per quarter, a trillion transactions per quarter that's a different game. To give you an idea of how much volume our platform handles, Visa and MasterCard combined processed 365 billion transactions in 2023. The PROS platform processed over 10 times that transaction volume in a 12 month period.
[laughter]
Todd McNabb: I wanna go over that stat again 'cause that was so cool we timed it a little bit better when we were going through rehearsals, but you still got the point. Over the last month, I've learned how valuable our partner ecosystem is, and you're gonna see us continue to accelerate and deliver. They're gonna help us deliver with speed, accuracy, and trust. And they're gonna play a huge role in this. And I'd like to invite one of our partners on stage LTIMindtree.
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Todd McNabb: Rajiv.
Rajiv Kumar: Todd.
Todd McNabb: How are you?
Rajiv Kumar: Fantastic.
Todd McNabb: It's like we were just here this morning.
Rajiv Kumar: How funny.
Todd McNabb: Yeah, well it's great to have you here. So tell me about LTIMindtree and what are you gus doing in this space.
Rajiv Kumar: Yeah, well, thanks for having us up here. LTIMindtree is super proud of our 14 year relationship with PROS. We're genuinely honored to be up here today. Our company is a digital transformation partner with over 700 clients worldwide. We deliver on consultancy and implementations of enterprise application software all of whom deliver AI.
Todd McNabb: Yeah. Well, so tell me about how the impact of AI across all our customers or just the industry in general.
Rajiv Kumar: Yeah, we like to think about it in terms of pace and impact. And the pace at which AI is evolving is just staggering. ChatGPT launched in November of 2022, and just with some basic text response capabilities, it reached a hundred million monthly users in three months. And today it is multimodal which means it can connect to data from text, audio speech visual, including from your camera phone to answer questions that you ask it in real time based on the surroundings that you're in. All this has transpired in only 17 months.
Todd McNabb: That's amazing.
Rajiv Kumar: Yeah. And so when you talk about the impact, McKinsey did a study in 2023 to try and measure the impact of productivity gains that AI would provide to the world, and also from where those gains would come from. What they found is AI could contribute up to $4.4 trillion to the global economy, annually. And if AI were its own country, and that was its GDP, it would replace Japan as the fourth largest economy in the entire world. Yeah. My brain just melted out my ears when I when I read that. So, what a really exciting time it is for all of us to be there when all of this first began, to say how lucky we were to be the visionaries that really embraced this evolution.
Todd McNabb: Yeah, that's an amazing stat in Japan. But give me an example of, with all that data and this opportunity we have in front of us, how are you working with your customers?
Rajiv Kumar: Well, technology buyers today they are really, really concerned with one or two pain points that are really important to them in their entire lead to revenue process. What we do is make sure that they're focused on what's truly important. So a pricing leader will often come to us and ask us, Hey, we would like to optimize our list prices because we wanna drive top line revenue growth. And this is a very viable case for AI, no doubt. The thing we always ask though is, how many of those transactions actually came from that listed price point? And the response we get is typically, yeah, I have no idea. So why is that important? Well, it's important because if 95% of your revenue is derived from negotiated prices owned by your customer facing team, then most likely what'll happen is they'll negotiate away, any of the list optimization you've achieved, because they themselves don't have any guidance from an AI solution.
Rajiv Kumar: So the biggest detractor... Sorry. So yeah, go ahead.
Todd McNabb: The biggest, I was just gonna ask, what was the biggest challenge? What do you think the biggest challenge is in this space? And you're seeing it come to fruition really fast. You talk about 18 months. This is... What are the biggest challenges and if you could share with everybody here, maybe what are the lessons learned?
Rajiv Kumar: Yeah, absolutely. Look, I loved what you said about what's really important, the speed, the accuracy, the trust, absolutely. After hundreds of implementations, we found that the biggest detractor to missed ROI expectations were distrust and resistance to change. And the fear of AI is tangible. We heard some of that in yesterday's customer panel with Andres. And we talked to a lot of end users ourselves in closed door sessions. And they talk about how they have some fear of job replacement. But look, I mean, honestly recently I saw a video of a couple robotic arms folding clothes. And for the most part it, was doing about as well as I do which is fine, except my family's always telling me it looks like I folded my clothes in the dark.
Rajiv Kumar: But look, the reality is that we're all thinking that how do we then drive a culture within our organizations that embraces human augmentation through the use of AI? And really what you need is to understand that we as business leaders, we understand the benefits of AI. We understand the revenue uplift, the margin, uplift the organizational efficiencies, but the reality is our end users, they don't get as jazzed about the prospects of a prettier PNL. What you really need is a WIIFM. What's in it for me? Which is a very well-defined, tailored message to very specific user groups that addresses the benefits to them in adopting AI. And trust, me we're gonna need more than one message to talk about all the motivations that drive human behavior in this case.
Todd McNabb: Yeah. It's interesting 'cause I think once you get in certain parts of the organization, the PNL almost becomes transparent. People don't see it. I love the WIIFM.
Rajiv Kumar: Yeah, absolutely. And on top of that we will also provide some tools and communications which can easily explain how AI is generating the recommendations it is. And it will build upon what PROS is already doing to help with that. So that's gonna drive adoption even faster. And we'll also establish feedback mechanisms for your users so that in the end, the transformation is happening with them and not to them.
Todd McNabb: Speaking of where you're leading, you built a pretty big practice, teams right up front here. You've built a big practice around PROS over the last several years. But I gotta ask you this, and I'm not sure if I asked you before, but I'll ask you now just to put you on the spotlight. What differentiates LTIMindtree?
Rajiv Kumar: Yeah, we have the largest PROS practice in the industry. This practice is made up of implementation experts, consultancy experts who help business leaders rethink their business processes to make sure it fits AI. We're differentiated, not only by the number of implementations we've done, but also by the partnership and the different levels of PROS, especially with product management. LTIMindtree has developed several add-ons, which enhance the PROS solution. Some of those you'll be able to find in the PROS marketplace pretty soon, so we're pretty excited about that. One of those add-ons is actually the priceless distribution tool. And what that does is it addresses what we call the final mile pricing. So it's a fully integrated solution, which can take prices from smart price management, and communicate them to your end customers automatically. Which today is an extremely manual and time consuming process.
Todd McNabb: Yeah, that's great. Well you heard a lot of us talk about our partner ecosystem and how important and we're gonna continue to see it accelerate over the next year or two, LTIMindtree, you guys are at the forefront of partnering with PROS. And I want to say thank you. It's great to have you and it's great meeting you just within the first 30 days here. It's been awesome. It's great working with LTI over the last several years that I've been within the industry. So thank you guys very much.
Rajiv Kumar: Yeah, absolutely. It's been a total pleasure. And of course, please do drop by and see us in the innovation center. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to show you a demo of the priceless distribution. We'd love to talk to you about your experiences with AI and exchange ideas about where you feel AI would fit within your organizations as well.
Todd McNabb: Great. Thank you.
Rajiv Kumar: Thank you so much.
Todd McNabb: Yeah, good seeing you. Thank you. Great. Okay. So I wanna finish where I started and say thank you to our customers and partners. Truly everything we do every day, whether it's in product, marketing, sales, finance, is centered around you. Our customer first culture. Everything we do in our company is always with keeping the customer in mind. So again, thank you so much. Thank you for attending. We've got a great day ahead. Remember, speed, accuracy, and trust will create scale for better financial outcomes for your business. And PROS, we will help you deliver on that today. So I look forward to the rest of the day. It's gonna be awesome, and I look forward to meeting all of you guys. Thank you very much.