MarTech Interview with Eran Helft, Director of Product Management at monday.com

Eran Helft, Director of Product Management at monday.com chats about the brand’s new transformative AI capabilities in this Q&A with MarTechSeries:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Eran, tell us about yourself and your role at monday.com.

Thanks for having me. I’m Eran Helft, and for the past 4.5 years, I’ve had the privilege of being a part of the monday.com team. I wear two hats here: Director of Product and GM for our apps marketplace.

For those unfamiliar with monday.com, we offer a Work Operating System (work OS) that most use as a work management platform, a CRM, or to manage the core of any kind of work. It empowers teams and organizations to collaborate & manage all their work processes effectively. What’s unique about the platform is that it’s super customizable. You can think of it like a set of building blocks – every account can mix and match to build their own application, ideal for the way they work. This allows us to serve an extremely diverse target audience – everything from a local two-person store selling bolts & screws to Fortune 100 companies managing CRM or complex IT workflows. No two accounts use monday.com the same way.

I guide a few areas of the workOS platform; our automation feature that enables users to build business logic & workflows, the platform’s UI & layout, and all tasks around how data is organized. I’m also responsible, together with my team, for our open platform enabling third-party developers to build apps to extend customization possibilities even further. In leading our apps marketplace, I oversee the business elements of our developers’ ecosystem – from acquiring developers to supporting them during the building process and helping them succeed and monetize. We aim to help these developers establish thriving, impactful businesses on the monday.com platform.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on some of the latest AI powered innovations by monday and how it enables user and their needs?

We recently unveiled our 2023 plans on how we plan to incorporate AI into the platform. We announced the monday AI assistant, which is an infrastructure that allows anyone to build AI apps anywhere in the platform. As a horizontal platform, everything we build must be developed in a fully customizable way, catering to our variety of different target audiences and use cases. Our approach to AI is built on the same principle.

We developed monday AI, a smart assistant that seamlessly integrates AI capabilities throughout the platform. What’s different about this assistant is its context awareness, meaning it understands where it’s being invoked and tailors its offerings based on that context. For example, when you engage the AI assistant in monday docs, it offers text-based actions like summarizing, translating, or rewriting. If you engage with it in the context of a formula column, it’s smart enough to suggest the correct formula based on the board data. And when invoked within a board, it can help set up the board for you.

What sets the AI assistant apart is how open it is. We designed it so anyone can build their own AI app on top of it. Each use case is an individual app built on the underlying AI infrastructure. This is the same infrastructure we use internally, and that is open to any third-party developer who wants to develop their AI app on top of monday.com. Whether to sell it or use it for their own work, the range of possibilities is endless.

It’s still early days, but we’re already seeing users gain “superpowers” thanks to AI. As the technology continues to evolve, we’ll see more and more unique ideas and use cases emerging from our team and the broader developer ecosystem that take these superpowers to the next level.

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How are AI powered tools redefining workplace systems around the world: a few key examples you’d like to highlight.

AI-powered tools are certainly making waves across the globe, revolutionizing the way we operate in the workplace. The pace of this change is remarkable—my response today might very well be out of date by next week! Nevertheless, here are a few examples that are currently making a significant impact, some of which we’ve already embraced at monday.com:

• Customer Support – AI has proven instrumental in automating customer service operations, especially when handling routine inquiries and Tier 1 support. This technology can answer frequently asked questions quickly and accurately, significantly enhancing the customer experience and improving internal efficiency.

• Knowledge Management – With so much information buzzing around, getting lost in the data deluge is easy. AI shines here by organizing and directing all this information to the right people. One helpful scenario is keeping our client-facing teams, like sales and support, updated about new features, benefits, and limitations. They can use everyday language to find precise answers to their questions or get a concise weekly digest of all critical updates.

• Data Transformation for Product Teams – Our client-facing teams are constantly in touch with clients, gathering valuable insights during their interactions. AI is fantastic at extracting these insights from long-form or unstructured data, tagging it, and making it easily accessible for decision-making. Of course, this also applies to support tickets, and it’s a game-changer. Suddenly, we can leverage a significantly broader data pool to inform our decisions.

These are just some examples of how AI is redefining workplaces worldwide, and I’m excited to see how this evolution continues.

What do you feel B2B teams should keep in mind when implementing AI tools across internal ops and workspace tech stacks?

That’s a great question. As B2B teams consider integrating AI tools into their operations and tech stacks, they should remember that this territory is new and evolving swiftly.

Therefore, it’s crucial to approach it with a sense of curiosity and humility.

At a practical level, there are a couple of key considerations:

• Privacy – Training models to provide accurate and contextually appropriate responses requires another layer of training based on specific data and context. In doing so, we must ensure that the information used in the training process doesn’t compromise privacy.

• Accuracy and Applicability – AI has become a bit of a buzzword and may appear to be the solution to everything—but it’s not. AI has transformative capabilities in certain areas but may not be as effective or appropriate in others. In implementing AI tools, teams should be educated about what AI can realistically achieve in different areas. This ensures that they can extract real business value from the technology and prevent misuse of AI where a human touch would yield superior results.

And lastly, it takes time and many iterations until we reach the desired outcome. Hang in there 🙂

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Take us through some of the top workplace SaaS trends you feel will dominate the industry and why?

While I can’t predict the future, and it’s still early to tell, I think the following trends will be at the forefront of the industry in the years to come:

• Revolution in UI/UX – We’ll witness a significant shift from the traditional “step-by-step clicking” interface to a chat-based user experience. This will fundamentally alter how we interact with workplace systems. For example, instead of clicking through various dashboards to find an answer, you could ask your question directly and receive an exact response. It’s a game-changer.

• Peak Personalization – Expect increased personalization in workplace systems, which will tailor their output based on the specific employee using them. For example, travel arrangements: even when factors like time, budget, and the number of meetings are consistent, preferences can differ dramatically between individuals. Now, AI can consider these unique preferences, creating a personalized travel plan for each person. As for me, hotels next to good restaurants, please.

• AI-Driven Automation – This one’s a no-brainer, but AI automation will likely play a significant role in the future of workplace SaaS. This is because it will handle routine tasks, freeing us to focus more on creative areas or tasks that demand a human touch. At least, that’s the hope!