1840 – The Complete Guide to Efficiency and Productivity with Artem Koren

Josh (00:00:05) - A thoughtful listener before we get going. Did you know that my company up my influence? Com has launched more than 200 business podcasts. The host of our shows are amazing leaders and collaborators. Folks, I want to connect you with. Maybe you deserve your moment in the spotlight as a guest of one of these amazing shows. Just go to up my influence. Com where you can see more than 50 shows that are actively seeking business leader guests like you to celebrate right now in front of their high caliber audiences. Just click on the podcast tab and up my influence. Com where you'll see shows like Experience Focused Leaders Podcast. If you're seeking insights on transforming customer experiences, you can't miss the Experience Focused Leaders podcast with your host, Alex Shevchenko. Alex, the CEO and founder of relay two, brings his rich background from Stanford MBA, Wharton BSc and the University of Pennsylvania B.A.. He's a smart dude, along with his real world experiences of building organizations across global hubs to the forefront of this engaging podcast. Now, each episode is a deep dive into the world of customer centric strategies, where Alex and his guests, seasoned business owners and industry veterans, share their invaluable insights.

Josh (00:01:32) - They discuss the latest trends, offer practical advice, and reveal the secrets behind exceptional customer experiences and business growth. Are you a business owner who values customer experience above all? Then this podcast is your go to resource. Better yet, if you've got unique insights and strategies that have helped you stand out in your industry, we'd love to have you as a guest on the show. Share your story with a community that's as passionate about customer experience excellence as you are. Tune in to the Experience Focused Leaders podcast for your weekly dose of inspiration and practical tips. Let's push the boundaries of customer experience together. With us right now. Artem Korin Artem, you are the co-founder and chief product officer with Assembly AI. You're found on the web at Assembly I. Artem, thank you so much for joining us.

Artem (00:02:30) - Glad to be here.

Josh (00:02:31) - Yeah. Well, give us an overview of what Assembly is.

Artem (00:02:36) - Assembly is an AI team, sometimes known as an AI meeting assistant. It joins your meetings in Google Meet Microsoft Team Zoom.

Artem (00:02:45) - And then it automatically takes your meeting notes, identifies your tasks, risks, issues, decisions. You can chat to an AI bot about your meeting, and you can send all of these items automatically to your favorite apps. For example, your todo app can automatically get to do's from the meetings you've had.

Josh (00:03:03) - Yeah, so we're recording this in kind of mid-February, and there's a lot of movement in this space. So I think the bottom line is, I mean, if you're just going I listen, I can tell you, you know, having used similar tools, not all have you kind of differentiate and explain what, you know, how assembly is different and why it's better and that sort of thing. And you know, which use cases might be helpful, but, you know, especially for people that have, you know, well in lots of cases, right, like if you have a lot of meetings in a day, I don't know if I'm alone, Artem, but I get to the end of the day and I'm like, who was that? What did we talk about by the end of the day? When, you know, when, that's usually when I end up doing all my follow up at the end, like without notes and summaries and, you know, transcripts or, you know, going back and sometimes, you know, having to watch,, some of my meetings, there's no way like, I have to rely on that.

Josh (00:03:56) - And so I'm excited because there's so much new technology that's available to us right now. So I would just say, number one, if you're not actively using an AI tool, I mean, that's just silly. Now that's we have the tools, we have the technology. But Artem where does assembly kind of fit in? You know, I've kind of explained my use case. You know, I have a lot of client meetings, a lot of potential client meetings. Obviously the podcast itself, all of the above I use great AI tools with.

Artem (00:04:27) - Ultimately, Assembly has two main goals. The first is to give you back time from your day. And there's a few ways that it does it. One way is it takes meeting notes for you so you don't have to, so you can focus on the call at hand. And then after the call, you're going to have the best meeting notes in industry. For example, we take into account the kind of a meeting you had, what the type of the meeting was.

Artem (00:04:52) - And so this was a sales meeting versus a daily stand up of your tech team or something else. The meeting notes are going to be completely different, including different sections, different details, very relevant to the specific insights that you might want to have in your notes from your meeting. So you can rely on those notes to be useful and helpful for you down the line. So that's first. Second is Assembly attends meetings in a very special way. It's actually a meeting attendee. So it's not a meeting recorder, although it will listen and will record the meeting when it's there. But it's a meeting attendee. That means that you can invite it to a meeting or have it attend a meeting that you're not even on. So you can invite assembly just like you would invite any other teammate by including it in a calendar invite or syncing your calendar with our product, and then it will automatically come based on your rules. But essentially, assembly can come to a meeting with, with or without you come back with the meeting notes, and then you can review those notes at your leisure.

Artem (00:05:50) - If you want to get into some more details, you can review a part of the video. We record the video as well, or you can go and look in the transcript. So those are some of the ways that we'll save you time. That's the second big thing that Assembly does is it enhances your meeting outcomes. That improves your results. So it does that in and that's several ways I'll mention to one is there's an AI chatbot that you can talk to. So you just mentioned okay I have these like all these meetings. By the end of the day I don't know who I talked to and what I talked about. I'm the same. I have a huge volume of meetings that I attend. And so when it's a few weeks later and I'm talking to someone from a sales team, from a vendor, and we're going back to numbers and prices and discounts, I don't remember if it was 20% or 25% or what it was. And so what I do, I literally do this. This is normal thing that I do now.

Artem (00:06:38) - I'm a big user of our own product is I will go into the conversation that I had with this vendor and I will ask our AI chatbot, hey, what was the discount they offered in our previous call? And it will simply will tell you it was like a 20% was offered. And I've had situations already where, you know, there's number X that we started the conversation on. That's why it was so interesting. And by the time it was a month later, that number somehow drifted to Y. And I have all the backing to say, no, no, no, we need to stick to the X. So that's one way that it improves outcomes., another way that it will improve outcomes is through the automation. So we connect into CRM, we connect into task management systems. And you can send meeting notes, tasks, all of these things to your app. So you can send it to notion. You can send it to slack. You can send it to Microsoft to do you can send it to Salesforce.

Artem (00:07:27) - , you want to manage your process. And so what that does is provide additional very relevant insights into your workflow so that other teams can benefit from it. When somebody else looks at the Salesforce and the interactions you've had with your customer, you have all the details there at your fingertips. So those are the two big value points of assembly.

Josh (00:07:48) - Yeah, that's very cool. And I think you've already illustrated some differentiation between,, maybe other tools that may be on the market. And, and I hope you're okay with maybe addressing,, you know, for folks that use zoom a lot, they not too long ago,, rolled in kind of an AI companion. It doesn't do what you described, but can I maybe just as of, again, when we're recording this, if you wouldn't mind, maybe, you know, kind of differentiate for someone that's in the evaluation phase. Right. So they're looking at your tool and they might be looking at other things that might be in the market. What are they going to find when they do their research.

Josh (00:08:24) - , in regards to the capabilities of assembly that just isn't out there, it.

Artem (00:08:29) - Really depends on what you're trying to get out of the meeting, notes and tests and all the insights that come out of a meeting. So, for example, if you're an individual user, 99% of your calls happen on zoom. And from time to time you kind of forget what you talked about with the person you want to kind of quickly check back on zoom and just see what it was about, like a through a quick summary zoom summary function is a great option and maybe for this case, a bit better option than assembly. However, if you want to instantiate meeting notes as a capability for yourself, for your team, for your organization, which means that it covers all the platforms that you use, including things like you can upload previously recorded conversation. So this is on zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams. It will exclude sensitive conversations, so only attend the right kinds of meetings. It will identify you and other users and assign them tasks.

Artem (00:09:27) - Appropriately. If you want to make sure that the quality of those meeting notes is up to par. The privacy and security is assured., it plugs into your other application workflows that you use. You need assembly for that. Zoom is not going to help you with that. So in brief one off individual, you're just on zoom. Great. You can use the zoom function meeting notes as a capability to power other processes on your team, and also tasks as a capability to power other processes on your team that you need assembly for.

Josh (00:10:00) - Yeah. And so maybe you could share them. Some of the clients that you work with., now I will say just regards to pricing, I mean, you could go all the way from just personal usage, very accessible. I don't know if you kind of explain the range of account options all the way up to enterprise to just.

Artem (00:10:19) - Try the product, just to get a sense of what it is. You can start with the personal plan that's free, but that's just to get a sense of what it is to have an AI meeting assistant app in your world to really get the benefit, to really see what the power is.

Artem (00:10:33) - You start with a professional plan. It's very accessible. It's as cheap as ten bucks a month if you buy a year, and on that, you can get most of everything you get. You get all, you get all the meeting notes, you get,, test transcripts, all of the bells and whistles. If you are using it with a team, with other coworkers,, you have advanced automation use case, like there's real integrations that you want to plug in for that you can use the team plan. And that's also very accessible. If you go month to month, it's 29, but it's much cheaper than that. It's less than $20 a month if you go for a full year per user and it's unlimited, meaning that you can have as many meetings as you want on it., no limit. So that's very special. Also about assembly is we don't starting with the team plan. There's no limit to how many meetings you can have., and you can just go all out, just use it for all the meetings in your world.

Artem (00:11:26) - They will become searchable. They'll become queryable with AI. It's beautiful. And then, of course, if you are a larger company, like an enterprise or even what we call a baby enterprise, like let's say you have, you know, a thousand users or something like that, you might want to look at the enterprise option. The enterprise option gives you things like a reporting hub., it gives you custom authentication controls, custom so and different authentication methods. And we also support things like data isolation and private cloud for enterprise customers. So for example, if you have to have your data hosted and processed in Singapore, we can do that for you with the private cloud for enterprise. So as you get more complex, your infrastructure requirements may get more complex. And,, we can support all that., no problem.

Josh (00:12:14) - And who would be some examples? You don't have to give their names or whatever, but, you know, maybe some examples of enterprise level clients that you're working with. And I'm curious about kind of their customer journey, what that look like, you know, how did they roll it in.

Josh (00:12:29) - And then, you know, how has, you know, if they're looking at the the outcomes they were hoping for? How is that being realized today for them?

Artem (00:12:38) - Yeah we have. So interestingly, the mix of industries that use our product is very diverse and we love that., so we're a very cross industry applicable product. We have some very happy customers in in pharma in construction. Construction has been a fantastic use case because good meeting notes and construction mean hedging your litigation risks. And then I can give you an example of, one of our larger customers is a company called Soap Cubed., it's a very large project management project control consultancy with a few thousand consultants,, based out of Europe, but also with a section of that company in the United States and other parts of the world., they've been a big and happy user. And essentially they started with basic meeting notes and then moved on to tasks. They're very project management oriented. So tasks is a very important for them. And you know, and then soon we expect they'll start to take advantage of the rate information.

Artem (00:13:37) - So risks issues really project PM PMO specific information. So they've really kind of slowly absorb the value set that somebody provides. And they've been very very happy with that., also PMI, the Project Management Institute is a customer of ours and we've had some great collaborations with them. It happens that mine and my co-founders, Gill McAuliffe's background is in management consulting. And so we're very much into program management. And we really like to digest the meeting and give you the actionable details beyond that. But it's interesting we continue to find interesting and highly valuable use cases that our customers bring to us with a tool like this. It's a frontier product. It's a frontier area. There's a lot of interesting new use cases that are now just formulating, but it's something now, as you said, it's obvious you have to have it in your life. And I absolutely agree.

Josh (00:14:32) - Yeah. So you guys have had some really great growth over the past five years., where is Assembly going now? Over the next few years.

Artem (00:14:41) - , we'll continue to grow. We will continue to be a leader in meeting notes. Automation will do a great job at servicing,, global corporates. So we already support over 40 languages with our product and also mixed languages. We're very unique in that. So if your team speaks like English and something else in the meeting like English and French, which is typical, you know, in our company and our global teams is generally pretty universal these days. We will support that really well and we're the only product to do that. So supporting global teams continue to be a leader in meeting those automation. And then we'll also start to expand out of just core meeting notes into doing more with tasks and task management automation, as well as more contextualized insights that can expand beyond meeting notes. You can think of meeting notes as kind of scratching the surface, but we will start to give you more and more value out of the meeting that you have always focused on saving you time after the meeting and enhancing your outcomes post meeting.

Josh (00:15:43) - Excellent. All right. So someone that's been listening to our conversation, the website is assembly dot AI. That's s e m as in Mary B as. And boy liked I when somebody goes there Artemis what would you recommend that they do.

Artem (00:15:58) - So two things. First of all hit the trial. There's a free trial. No obligation. You can get into it, sync with your calendar and you're off to go. There's no downloads. There are no installs. The product is completely online based, works purely SaaS. And so you can be up and running in a matter of minutes with assembly, literally minutes very, very easy. So that's first. Second, if you're from a larger company, security and privacy is your concern of course, as well it should be. We have on our website a trust center. So if you go under company and you look there's a link to a trust center. This is our area of our website where we have collected all of the relevant information about how we deal with privacy and security, including very detailed documentation.

Artem (00:16:43) - So you can peruse that,, and then engage with our team for any additional questions.

Josh (00:16:49) - Yeah. All right. Again, Artem Corin,, you were the chief product officer and co-founder Assembly. I,, that's the website assembly. I Artem, thank you so much for joining us. And,, yeah, keep I tell you. Hey, keep keep doing your work to make life easier for those of us with,, busy schedules, you know, lots of zoom meetings and being able to manage that a lot better. So as as someone who,, you know, whose life is dramatically impacted by new tools that are available to us now that, you know, weren't available to us in the past. Thank you so much.

Artem (00:17:25) - Thank you for having me.

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