Imagine showing up to work with a full team of AI agents by your side: agents that know your goals, work across your apps, and elevate your impact from day one. In this conversation, PROS’ Sunil John and Ajay Damani unpack what makes PROS AI different, how autonomous agents are transforming enterprise productivity, and why this is such an exciting time to be an AI leader.
Watch the video to learn how PROS AI is powering smarter selling, intelligent incentives, and a future where every user becomes a force multiplier.
Video Highlights
- 0:12 – What is agentic AI and what makes PROS AI stand out from the competition?
- 3:35 – How do AI agents elevate human potential?
- 4:47 – Can you walk us through some PROS AI agents that our customers are really excited about?
- 6:20 – How do we see agentic AI evolve over the next 3-5 years?
- 7:45 – What does the future of work look like with AI agents?
- 9:31 – How can AI agents transform the end-to-end buyer journey for PROS customers?
- 10:48 – What does the trust-building process look like for AI agents?
Full Transcript
Hey, Ajay. Hi, Sunil. Maybe just explain what Agentic AI is and how our solutions are different from other AI solutions that are out there in the market.
Yeah. So I’m gonna start with the latter part of that question. First, our solutions are not just any general purpose AI.
So our focus has always been on bringing the right business problems, solving that via AI, but we use many different machine learning algorithms as well as AI algorithms to ensure that we solve specific business Yeah.
So so, like, when we’re trying to put offers out there, you know, those offers are characterized not only by the the products that are there, but the prices and the quantities, and all these sort of very precise numerical elements. And it sounds like that’s where we really shine when we bring those together with language.
That’s exactly right. So, you know, we we take our numerical models and we completely infuse those with large language models, and the combination of that is what we are bringing to market. And it’s very, very special because it allows the users and the AI to work in unison as one. AI is there. It’s guiding the user. It’s making predictions, surfacing recommendations, and really elevating the user’s productivity as well.
And and relative to the AI that we’ve always had really focused on these numerical models, the recent addition has been a lot more incorporation of language models in the form of agents.
And so that’s what you’re what you’re saying is that now these agents allow our users to really have a a a friend, if you will, helping them get the offers out the door, offers that win. That’s right. And and the the the power of the agent is bringing in AI, bringing in tools that are underneath that, and stitching that all together, but truly focused on a business outcome. Our agents are fully goal oriented, so they have to be able to achieve a particular goal. They have chain of thought reasoning, so they go through and figure out what are the different steps that I need to take in order to achieve the goal that the user has set out for me. And finally, they’re autonomous. So they run and operate independently, but they can be fully autonomous or they can have a human in the loop and surface the recommendations and allow the human to determine whether the recommendation’s appropriate or not, and it’s constantly learning with those recommendations.
So that makes it very much like if I was gonna add a human to my team and hire somebody, and day one I might give them some amount of responsibility to do and check to see if they’re they’re doing it the way that that we need for them to do it.
And then over time, I’ll start giving them more and more autonomy as I start to trust them more. And and you’re you’re sort of describing agents in a in a very similar way.
It’s in a very similar way. But think about the power of the agent as having knowledge of your most experienced user, always by your side. So when you have the most experienced person by your side, the agent’s making recommendations, and it really compresses your learning curve.
That’s right, everybody learns faster.
Everyone learns faster. Yeah. That’s right.
So this gets back to a discussion we were having yesterday morning about how this type of concept and how these agents, teams of agents, really elevate human potential. Maybe click into that, because I know you’ve had a lot of thoughts about how agents really help elevate human potential.
Yeah, so let’s take a very specific scenario.
From a business point of view, market conditions are changing.
There is a high degree of volatility. There’s so many signals that are out there. And today, the human has to listen for these signals, figure out where the noise is and where the signal is in all of this data, and then distill that down into an action that they can actually take. That takes a lot of time. Now our agents today are doing all of that work for them. They’re already listening for these signals. They’re goal oriented, so they know what is it, what goal they’re trying to achieve, so they understand the signal versus the noise in all of this data that’s coming in, and then make the right recommendations through their chain of thought reasoning there as well.
Awesome, awesome.
So, you know, we’ve had a lot of agents we’ve unveiled here at Outperform. We’ve got many more on the road map ahead. Maybe talk about a couple of your agents that really come to mind that you’ve seen a lot of people, a lot of our customers react to over the course of the last couple of days?
I think there’s just been a lot of excitement around our sales agent.
And the sales agent not only helps the salesperson, the buyer, but also helps the seller as well. It’s the exact same agent, whether it’s attacking the buyer persona or the seller persona as well. The agent’s learning both sides of it, but helping both the buyer as well as the seller.
Really is part that Yeah. It really is part of that team, like you were saying earlier.
That’s right. What what’s been one of your favorites?
I like the concept of how some of our agents nudge the sale along. So in the same way that you’re talking about where the agent is just part of the the sales journey, helping the buyer, helping the seller get a sale over the line.
When you’re in a situation where you have a lot of offers to manage and deal with, it can be hard to sort through and understand which ones I need to focus on first, a high priority action list. Having an agent that comes in and just lets me know which one of my offers I need to focus on first as we saw in our group sales agent, that was really powerful. And I think that’s something that really is gonna be a big benefit to all of our travel agents all over the world. You know, may maybe let’s, let’s let’s talk about, like, you know, with this agentic technology, language models at the core, and our own AI with numerical models at their core, and as they come together even more and more in novel and creative ways, like, let’s let’s look out over the next three to five years, and and where does that take us?
You know, think one of the most, inspiring, talks for for me for the event was really from doctor Mike, Michael Wu on the future of AI, but not just where we are, but what does the road look like to artificial general intelligence, and then further from that, super intelligence.
And I think for me over the next three to five years, I can’t wait to see how this curve towards artificial general intelligence truly matures because we’re just at the beginning stages of how AI is going be transformational for all of mankind. Any predictions on how that evolves? So I think it’s gonna be another maybe a year, maybe two years out where it starts to evolve. But what’s going to be different in that world of AGI is that the reasoning is just gonna get better and better and better. And as the reasoning gets better, the computation needs are going to get higher, but businesses are also going to get more comfortable with adopting AI.
So I really do believe this concept of every person having a whole team behind them, whole team behind them of agents, is a really powerful one because it really accelerates careers.
It lets us do more, you know, over the whole world. You know, whatever we’re trying to get done through all of the different forms that that different companies take all over the world, it lets us do more, and that’s pretty exciting. So I’m imagining a world where when I come into work, I have an agent right there, and that agent may understand all of the apps that I work with. And as I describe the goals that I want to accomplish, whether for today or whether for a longer time period, six months from now, a year from now, all of a sudden, I’ve got a whole team behind me that can help me accomplish those goals. When we think about all these goals working together, like all of us working together at PROS or or in any company in the world, I think it’s limitless the kind of the the kind of productivity we can have and what we can we’re only limited now by our own creativity and our imagination.
All the doing is gonna be so much more powerful than it ever was before. And it’s it’s I think it’s really hard for me to imagine and it’s really hard for me not to get super excited about that world.
Yeah. What I love about what you said in here is really this concept about an AI assist versus AI augmented and eventually getting to AI led as well. And having this team of agents that’s always by your side helping you achieve your goal so that you can focus on more creative, more strategic things, it’s a very powerful idea.
That’s right. And when we think about PROS, you know, we’ve always been very focused on helping our sellers get the most compelling and incredible offers out the door that balance profitability for them with immense value for the buyer.
And as we think about how agents can really help, know, I I think we’ll start to see our own aperture expand to more and more that journey as the buyer begins their discovery process all the way to purchase and then eventually purchase again. And we’ve got so many opportunities to really touch them again and again in in very very approachable ways.
And if we can do that, I think it’s just gonna be incredible, the experience for the buyer. I mean, as a as a consumer, as a buyer for for PROS, and as a buyer in my personal life, I think that’s gonna be an incredible moment for me because I don’t always enjoy looking around all over the world to to find things.
That’s right. You know, and as we transform from AI assisted to AI augmented to eventually to AI led, one of our foundational principles is truly around being able to be responsible and have explainability. That’s a great point. Right? Because, you know, you made a point earlier about how our agents can either work completely autonomously or with a human in the loop.
And I do think there’s a natural progression.
In the same way that trust is built between humans, trust is gonna be built between humans and the team of agents behind them. And so as it starts off, you know, the assisted, the recommendations are because I can see how it’s interacting with me and I build trust with the agent that way. But over time, I’m gonna give it more and more responsibility, and I’ll start doing other things. And I think that’ll be a really fun moment As certain agents, I build more trust with them. Maybe other ones I don’t.
But altogether, I think it’ll be great to have a team behind me.
That’s great. That’s great. Look, I think it’s been an incredible journey over the last four months. Our teams have really come They’ve been incredible. They’ve been awesome.
They’ve been really incredible.
And I think just the way that we’ve been able to bring these agents to market, I can’t wait to see what the next six months are going to look like and how we’re gonna help our customers up think, outpace, and eventually outperform.
That’s right.
