ARCHIVE: Internal Communications Record SOURCE: Aperture Systems LOCATION: San Francisco DATE: 15 March 2027 INTEGRITY: 100% ACCESS LEVEL: Internal - Begin Transcript - [09:01] PRIYA PATEL, SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER: Morning Grant! Hope you had a great weekend! Have 2 minutes to chat about the AI assistant pilot? [09:08] GRANT MERCER, HEAD OF NORTH AMERICAN SALES: Good morning Priya. I can probably spare a few minutes today, but like I said on Friday we just renewed our Sales Suite contract, part of that contract includes automated meeting notes so I don't know if we will realistically be able to put any budget towards a pilot that does basically the same thing. [09:10] PRIYA PATEL: Totally get that, but it is not a meeting-notes tool. The goal is to deploy an agentic operating layer across North American Sales, Solutions, and Support. Basically more sales for your org, fewer tickets for support, less SE time consumed reviewing reference architectures before calls. Net Net is faster response times, more sales, and happier customers. [09:12] GRANT MERCER: Jesus what an elevator pitch! Might have to steal you from the product team and bring you into sales! Almost sounds too good to be true, and it sounds expensive. [09:13] PRIYA PATEL: Honestly, you have to see it to believe it. But it would not require anything additional from you budget wise. As a company we already have a spend commit with Anthropic, so my leaders have approved me to tap into that since we've basically spent none of it since last years mess. Initially I would like to run a pilot to handle the following work that reps are already losing time doing themselves: - drafting emails - automatically creating and updating support tickets - Logging customer interactions into the CRM - Managing pipeline, opportunity sales stages, and forecasting - Prepare deployment requests from AE/SE handover notes The reps are still responsible for the outcome and verifying that the AI is doing things in the way they want, but the assistant will take about 90% of the heavy lifting. We've already tested this in an isolated test environment, and it's got the green light from VP of tooling, now we need to roll this out to a pilot group. [09:45] GRANT MERCER: Sorry was just in a 1x1... As long as this thing doesn't start sending out unvetted emails or quotes to the client. What happens if it sends something out that's wrong and then we're on the hook. That's the main reason we rolled back AI usage last year, we had 15 deals close at negative margin because AI started selling at a loss. [09:46] PRIYA PATEL: Reps vet everything and do all the sending themselves, for the pilot the AI assistant will mainly be taking on back end, or monotonous admin tasks. Output is still on the rep. [09:55] GRANT MERCER: So what are we trying to solve here then? If the rep still has to vet everything, sounds like double work and I'm already getting told to reduce the number of weekly meetings our teams have in the calendar. [09:56] PRIYA PATEL: The immediate problem is administrative load. Your teams spend too much time moving information between systems that they could be using to close deals or find new ones. Initially reps approve everything, so yes a bit of different work... not necessarily extra work. But eventually we'd have this fully automated. Reps would only need to worry about the relationship aspects of the business - shaking hands and kissing babies. This is much bigger than the sales automation AI deployment you ran last year, this is going to go deep and help reps get actionable insights from otherwise boring and time consuming data across all the systems we use. [10:00] GRANT MERCER: I guess you just can't fight AI forever... OK so what do you need? To get this going? Want me to connect you with one of the sales directors to pilot with one of the teams? Maybe we do one of the underperformers to see if this turns things around. [10:01] PRIYA PATEL: We need to roll this out to all 2400 reps. [10:08] GRANT MERCER: That's not a pilot. [10:09] PRIYA PATEL: We're calling it a controlled rollout, not all at once but the goal is to get all 2400 onboarded by the end of the quarter. We need to start using this so we can train the AI models to eventually do this stuff on their own before FY28. This is the direction the business wants product to move in, we're supporting IT to make this work. [10:15] GRANT MERCER: Ok send me the change management request in JIRA. What access does this need? I'll ping IT to let them know. [10:16] PRIYA PATEL: Email, calendar, Connect messages, CRM, ticketing, the customer deployment console, call transcripts, and the internal knowledge base. Read access by default. Write access where the action can be reversed or placed behind approval. [10:20] GRANT MERCER: IT security signed off on that? I couldn't even get Salesloft approved because they had a breach 3 years ago... [10:21] PRIYA PATEL: We have all sign offs other than yours. We didn't want to waste your time until everything was done on our end especially with SKO coming up next week. Wanted to respect your time. [10:24] GRANT MERCER: I appreciate that. OK I'll sign off, but what's the end goal here. What should I be looking for out of the regions with this thing? [10:25] PRIYA PATEL: Honestly, sales should start increasing almost immediately... Then eventually, you'll probably be able to start cutting headcount without taking a hit to ACV. Then ultimately, it will probably turn into a situation where it will actually hurt your numbers to have human sales reps in any of your regions. That's kind of why they're pushing us so hard to get this going quickly, we want to be first with something like this. [10:29] GRANT MERCER: Wow... I hate to say it, but Jesus we're finally getting a tool to do what the board has been wanting us to do for the past 10 years. More sales, less people. More money. Well, what's this thing going to be called? [10:30] PRIYA PATEL: Continuity [10:32] GRANT MERCER: HA! Not for the reps... [10:33] GRANT MERCER: HA! <MESSAGE DELETED> [10:34] PRIYA PATEL: This is honestly going to make our RSU's worth a fortune. [10:36] GRANT MERCER: I could use a new boat :) OK, 6 minutes late for my 10:30 talk later. Let me know what you need from me. [10:37] PRIYA PATEL: THANNNNKS GRANT :):) - End Transcript - - End Log - Status: RESOLVED Record Saved: 22 August 2026