The work of so-called “solutions professionals” — people like sales engineers, solution architects and consultants — revolves around pitching complex business technology to potential customers. It’s important work. However, despite this happening, solution teams are rarely staffed and resourced adequately, according to entrepreneur Dan Chen.
“Solution Teams bring technical credibility to the sales movement and help the customer understand exactly what they are buying and why,” Chen told TechCrunch in an interview. “They are the unsung heroes of the business-to-business sales organization, yet they are constantly overlooked.”
Chen, formerly a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital and co-founder of Hero, a Salesforce support app acquired by HR startup People.ai in 2021, believes the answer lies in AI — specifically genetic AI. So with his friend Michael Graczyk (with whom Chen also co-founded Hero), he created Quilta platform that hosts AI assistants for solution sales teams.
“Two things happened in 2022 that made Quilt possible,” Chen continued. “First, the market correction caused a sharp 180 from ‘grow at all costs’ to ‘do more with less’… Second, the release of [OpenAI’s] ChatGPT in late 2022 led to an explosion of new products and services based on publicly available pre-trained [AI] models.”
Quilt’s core products are artificial intelligence assistants designed to help solution engineers with tasks such as completing requests for proposals, answering basic technical questions, and preparing for demonstrations. Assistants, Chen says, can fill out security and due diligence questionnaires, field questions from agents via Slack, and summarize the contents of notes, calls and research before client meetings.
This all sounds like pretty standard workflow automation stuff. But Chen insists that Quilt is uniquely able to incorporate engineers’ technical knowledge and “understand the context.”
“The quilt saves [teams] time with routine tasks so they can spend more time with customers and help win more deals,” Chen said.
But what about genetic AI’s tendency to “hallucinate”? It’s no secret that models like ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot make mistakes summaries — including, problematically, in meeting summaries. In a recent article, The Wall Street Journal refers a case where, for an early adopter using Copilot for meetings, Copilot invented the participants and implied that the calls were about topics that were never discussed.
Quilt’s AI can automatically fill out forms and questionnaires, pulling data from solution teams and company databases.
Chen claims that Quilt is less prone to such illusions because its models and training processes “distinguish the facts the model ‘knows’ from the facts in the corporate data.”
“Most AI startups continue to underestimate illusions and how they can damage customer trust,” he said. “Sales teams will not use tools that make things up and fill in details with fake information.”
But what about how Quilt handles data? Investigations show that many businesses are concerned about the privacy and security risks associated with genetic artificial intelligence. Apple, Samsung and Verizon, among others, have reportedly restricted internal use of tools like ChatGPT out of fears that employees will expose sensitive information to them.
Chen says Quilt doesn’t share data with organizations and allows users to request deletion of their account — and data — at any time.
Those assurances seem to have been enough to calm investor concerns, for what it’s worth. Sequoia recently led a $2.5 million round in Quilt, with angel investors from DataDog, HubSpot, DoorDash, Asana, Eventbrite and a16z.
It’s early days — Chen didn’t reveal the names of Quilt’s clients. But fueled in part by the seed capital, Quilt has plans to grow its six-person team, scale up its marketing efforts and “accelerate the development of the next helper solutions,” Chen said.
“In the next two years, AI will be a key factor between the best and worst performing sales organizations,” he added. “For large, complex and often technical products, solution teams are the backbone of the sales process.
Chen may have a point. When it comes to sales operations in general, there is a lot of interest in what genetic AI can achieve — and what applications it can accelerate.
According to a 2023 survey by sales execution platform Outreach, 62% of sales organizations are already actively using genetic AI for use cases such as improving customer interactions, updating customer relationship management data and responding to requests for suggestions. There is reluctance among some – 42% of respondents said they are concerned about the inaccuracies of the technology. But the majority believe that genetic AI has the potential to boost productivity by streamlining existing tasks.
“Given the kinds of customers that Quilt works with, we are well positioned to be the AI partner of choice for solution teams,” said Chen.
