The Voice Layer For AI In The Real World | Sagi Reuven

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #275, we welcomed Sagi Reuven, Chief Revenue Officer at Deepdub based in Tel Aviv, Israel. 

Deepdub is the enterprise voice infrastructure powering AI in production. Deepdub built their credibility in the most demanding voice environments in the world: Hollywood studios, global broadcasters, and premium content pipelines where voice quality, emotional accuracy, and reliability are non-negotiable.

Deepdub enables zero-shot voice cloning, voice-to-voice, ADR, accent control, and ultra-low latency delivery designed for systems that operate live, at scale, and in front of real customers.

Get started here> https://deepdub.ai/ FYI even better if you let them know that CXC sent you their way!

In this episode, Sagi and Adrian chat through the Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback. Plus share some of the ideas that his team think through on a daily basis to build world class customer experiences.

**Episode #275 Highlight Reel:**

1. Personalize for problems, not people.
2. Keeping top talent by building smarter teams
3. AI's impact on leadership & strategy
4. The Partnership Economy is here
5. Changes to prepare for in the work place

Click here to learn more about Sagi Reuven

Click here to learn more about Deepdub

Huge thanks to Sagi for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & contact center space into the future. 

For all of our Apple & Spotify podcast listener friends, make sure you are following CXC & please leave a 5 star review so we can find new members of the "CX Nation". 

You know what would be even better?

Go tell your friends or teammates about CXC's custom content, strategic partner solutions (Hubspot, Intercom, & Freshworks) & On-Demand services & invite them to join the CX Nation, a community of 15K+ customer focused business leaders!

Want to see how your customer experience compares to the world's top-performing customer focused companies? 

Check out the CXC Healthzone, an intelligence platform that shares benchmarks & insights for how companies across the world are tackling The Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback & how they are building an AI-powered foundation for the future. 

Thanks to all of you for being apart of the "CX Nation" and helping customer focused business leaders across the world make happiness a habit!

Transcript

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:00.782)
All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Adrian Brady Cizana. Super excited, guys. It's one of the first episodes of the new year. It's been a busy couple weeks out of the gates for 26, but super duper pumped to have an incredible guest with us today from an incredible company. Saggy, say hello to the CX Nation, my friend.

Sagi Reuven (00:19.664)
Hey, Adrian, it's good to be here.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:22.072)
So guys, Saghi and his team at DeepDub are building, number one, not just a super cool business and a super cool set of products and solutions, from a conversation last week with Saghi and learning more about the DeepDub team, they've been building in this space and they've been building in a world that many of us are starting to really pay attention to for many years. So I'm super pumped for Saghi to join the show today and to share his experiences and to talk about the incredible things that his team at DeepDub are doing.

So before we jump into the pillars and before I jump into the fun stuff, take a couple minutes to set the stage. Take a couple minutes to introduce yourself, some of the things maybe that you were doing even before DeepDev, how you got into this world that you are in as the chief revenue officer of an incredible business like DeepDev. Just give the CXation a little bit of your background and some of the stepping stones for how you got into this whole world.

Sagi Reuven (01:15.379)
Perfect. Thank you, Adrian. So my name is Seguiru Venn, Chief Revenue Officer here at DeepDab for the last three years. Before that, for like 10 years, I've been bringing AI to production. Started around 2015 when I was a medical device startup CEO. Back then with retinal imaging and blood vessel classification, that was the very basic first applications of AI.

Then I moved to a biotech company where we use that to identify proteins. Later on, I was a global business development leader at Siemens Digital Industries. And most of the work was again, bringing AI to the electronics manufacturing process, working with manufacturers and helping them with testing.

and various other applications in complex product manufacturing. Then I did the same thing with anti-money laundering. This was like an unsupervised, the first kind of real life applications for unsupervised machine learning. This was a little bit before the AI and generative AI.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (02:27.892)
nice!

Adrian Brady-Cesana (02:37.997)
Okay?

Sagi Reuven (02:42.481)
I think boomed in, then I joined DeepDub. DeepDub is a foundational voice model company. So when DeepDub started in 2019, 2020, this was still machine learning and the infrastructure was not ready for that. So DeepDub had to build the entire infrastructure with Nvidia servers and doing the whole building the training infrastructure.

And it's a completely different adventure, completely different business world that we live in. It's very fast, rapidly changing. mean, you can wake up in the morning and there is a new model out there that does this and does that. And you have to adopt really, really fast to changes.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (03:26.126)
100%. Yep.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (03:36.662)
I mean, number one, makes a ton of sense. Number two, you guys are working with some, in some ridiculous environments, Hollywood studios, global broadcasters, all of these other premium content creation pipelines. So like you guys are working with some, some people that not only do they need stuff now and do they need it done very well, but like these are people that are constantly playing with and understanding what voice infrastructure and how AI is going to play into voice infrastructure.

is doing so super duper cool. Before we even jump into deep dub, talk about a different world man. Some of the things that you were doing before deep dub, right? Like that must have helped. Meaning like one of the things I'm always fascinated by is like some of our guests, man, they end up becoming their executives in some of these companies that do whatever type of Willy or where. It's always fascinating to me to hear and to see how many folks come from wildly different places and spaces and industries. like, like what you were mentioning before from

Sagi Reuven (04:17.853)
Absolutely.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (04:34.638)
from Siemens to some of the medical stuff to money. Must have been an interesting set of different things to go through. So by the time you get to Deep Dubs, writing a playbook or helping to understand sort of your role in terms of how the hell am gonna grow this business? How am gonna find more customers? How am gonna drive revenue? How am gonna retain revenue? You must have had a lot of different points of perspective that you brought into the Deep Dubs role and into your years of helping to grow and build the company.

Sagi Reuven (04:35.911)
Yeah.

Sagi Reuven (05:03.518)
Yeah, I mean, that's a great story. I mean, from my perspective, because there are two main topics that I think made a lot of impact on me along the years. The first one is the understanding that working with AI requires very deep understanding of the benefits.

And because there's always tension and it's not just a financial justification, right? Let's calculate the ROI, but there's a lot of politics around that because maybe you're taking some other people's jobs and maybe, you know, the, actors said, we need to get compensated and all kinds of things that, that happened along the years. we see it all over the place now.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (05:38.776)
Sure.

Sagi Reuven (05:55.247)
with AI, so I think the first and foremost, I, realized that you have to deliver value. You have to deliver value constantly all the time. it cannot be something minor because then the impact will not justify the change. Okay. Now you can say that I'm stating the obvious, but it's not just a software replacement.

It's not the changing your CRM. It's a very destructive process that some companies might see it as sending a message out there. Okay. So the second thing is related to understanding the, if you want to do like really great things together with your clients, you have to be considered as a consultant.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (06:48.79)
Absolutely.

Sagi Reuven (06:49.877)
Yeah, you have to be considered as someone that is helping, helping them to solve something. that gets you to a different level of conversation. And I think this is the second thing that I learned along the years, especially with Siemens in Siemens, you, you, you tend to come to companies that, you know, it can be like a $50 million project and they have consultants, they have employees, they have people from all over the place. They need you to teach them something new.

They're not interested in another sales process. Otherwise they won't spend time on you. You need to talk about the big problem, the size of the problem, and you need to talk about new ideas. need to be considered as someone that brings these, like the real added value into the process in helping them go through some kind of transformation.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (07:24.526)
100%.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (07:44.462)
100%. You know, it's like, even you say this, reminds me of, um, can't remember the exact name of the book, but it's a, it's essentially, it's about this notion of the partnership economy. And it's this notion of future sales teams and future companies that are very successful at growing and finding new customers and growing the revenue. It's not just about bringing folks through a pipeline. It's actually about bringing, bringing the right folks, the right customers, the right users.

sometimes a smaller level, more of the concept of quality, not quantity, establishing a partnership level with a customer. Sagi, I always kind of joke around and you probably, know exactly what I'm going to say is, like, guys, some of the best customers that you can have in life or that you can bring forward to other businesses or to other things that you're doing. If you become a partner, if you establish a partner level,

Sagi Reuven (08:28.439)
Yes.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (08:42.222)
status or relationship with a customer. Let me stretch it further. If you can get to partnership level, you're already almost in friendship mode or team mode. Meaning these clients already look at you as an extension of the business, an extension of the team. Your point about like, you gotta be bringing value, you gotta be bringing great ideas. It's not just about the whiz bang flash stuff. Like you gotta be creating value. And this notion of like partnership economy or this notion of all of our listeners.

Sagi Reuven (09:02.619)
you you

Adrian Brady-Cesana (09:08.502)
If you're building a company, if your company's building Willys or Wares or your services aren't kind of already built with this notion of like, how the hell do we go from like level one from the minute that we find a new prospect to lead an opportunity to qualify that we can help and that they're right for our stuff, all the way to level five partnership level where like you are literally embedded in the business. That's game changer, right? And then it's also one of the easiest ways to grow a business is to find a swath of customers that you can establish with them. It's way much easier.

It's what she's said, then done obviously, Sagi, but I love that notion.

Sagi Reuven (09:40.36)
Yeah, and I add to that that the most difficult part, especially for us sellers, right, is to to really move into that consultant mode means that you would sometimes have to recommend the client to do something that is not in line with your interests.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (10:02.36)
Yeah. Yep.

Sagi Reuven (10:03.785)
And that I think that's the moment for like, if you are able to do that, then they trust you.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (10:10.99)
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So, know, as we've grown CX Chronicles, we've been able to, we've been so fortunate to be able to build a stable of the critical strategic partners. Some of them are software companies. Some of them are our telephonics companies. Many of them now are AI companies, we're like starting to understand some of these incredible folks that have been on the show. We start to understand what they're doing for the customers. We start to understand what their teams really build. And anyway, the point is,

Sagi Reuven (10:31.488)
You

Adrian Brady-Cesana (10:39.572)
Many times in, as we get to meet all these incredible companies that we have an opportunity to work with at CXE, a big part of what we're doing is we're talking about different partner possibilities or different partner solutions that could be right for them. But some of those different partner opportunities and solutions absolutely have different financial impact to the business, to CXE or to the business. Some partner opportunities, we can help introduce it. We can help to sell it or bring it to the customer. Then because we're experts at doing other things with implementation and optimization and

and doing the actual ongoing management. Some of those tools, we could absolutely say that that's the best tool that there is, but a big part of what we've gotten really good at is just offering the menus. And so for many of our customers, it's like showing them the menu, showing them what types of things are on the menu, understanding how hungry they are and what type of meal they want, understanding what the team needs and what type of food their team's trying to eat. And sometimes you're absolutely right. Sometimes all we can really truly offer is the coffee. Even though we want to show them.

Sagi Reuven (11:25.319)
you

Yeah.

Sagi Reuven (11:37.63)
haha

Adrian Brady-Cesana (11:38.51)
We want to show them the appetizers and we want to show them multiple drinks and we want to show them three sets of dinners and then, but it doesn't always work that way. And then you're absolutely right. Whereas we've grown this business, man. There has been people that by giving them a coffee early on, two, three years later, they come back and then they're ready to buy a steak or they're ready to buy steak and a bottle of wine and all that other stuff. So I love, I love that thought for our listeners. Really interesting way to think about as you're building your businesses. A lot of times it's really offering information, value, expertise upfront.

And then later on down the line, the universe comes back later. Sometimes it's not even them, Saggy, right? Sometimes it's one of their friends. Maybe they never buy from you, but then they remember that or they learn something about what you can offer. And then one of their friends is in a need for that. And they say, you should go reach out to Deep Dive. You should go reach out to Adrian. You should reach out to Saggy. So it happens all the time. So yeah, I want to jump into the first pillar team. Talk about the team that you guys are building at Deep Dive. Talk about the team that you've built. What types of different folks do you have on the team? Where are you guys all located? Are you across the world? Are you at Tel Aviv?

Sagi Reuven (12:11.721)
Exactly.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (12:32.982)
Spend a couple of minutes kind of talking about the deep-dumped team solicitors to a sense for what you all are building.

Sagi Reuven (12:37.047)
All right, perfect. So deep dab, yeah, some of the team is in Tel Aviv, people working in direct sales of what we do, like dubbing as a service. We have two other folks doing business development work that is related more to the API business. I'll explain a little bit about the profile in a bit. We have someone senior that is based in the US, and he's a VP of sales.

of North America, this is where most of our big customers are. And some kind of like a demand generation orchestrator that is kind of like helping us with everything that is related to demand generation. I think we are a pretty lean team. You need to be very dynamic because

Adrian Brady-Cesana (13:11.49)
Okay?

Sagi Reuven (13:36.745)
It's not so easy. mean, people tend to have a mindset and this brings me to the profile and I tried hiring and I had to replace people along the years because the lifestyle of this new world, especially with AI, it's rapidly changing. There is, you cannot have a playbook. I mean, it can change twice a week and some people are having challenges with that.

They are used to, okay, this is what I need to do. This would be like the more methodological people. Like you have profiles, sales people have like different profiles and some people are more methodological. Like they want to follow the process. They want to be strict with the numbers. This is how they qualify. Boom, boom. They have it all structured and they, they ace it. And I think this fits to a situation when you are not, when you're selling software, this could be the situation because.

What you're offering is not that disruptive and does not require a higher level of education that goes beyond the product. When you're selling a CRM, you pitch on your CRM and that's it. But when we are pitching in this AI space, you need to educate the client on gazillion other things because he needs to sell it internally and people don't necessarily understand it yet. What are the legal implications? And this stuff is very dynamic.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (14:54.296)
Yep. Yep.

Sagi Reuven (15:03.279)
And the differentiation that you have between the competitors is different. you need to have, I tend to hire people that are very curious, really like in the hunter mode, that are like kind of like able to do like a lot of context switching pretty quickly. And they go more on the art kind of.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (15:14.477)
Love it.

Sagi Reuven (15:30.569)
approach rather than being very methodological in that sense, because you actually have to be dynamic.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (15:33.506)
What's like you so really quick, one thing I've been doing differently in some of our episodes. It's funny. When I look at deep dubs team and LinkedIn, and then you do the aggregate view that LinkedIn provides us to with your team. all the folks, all the awesome folks you guys have on the team of LinkedIn, right? Media communication, arts and design operations, information technology and engineering. And so you just said they tend to be more on like the artistic. So media arts ops, and then info that's a

Sagi Reuven (15:55.031)
you

Sagi Reuven (16:02.108)
Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (16:03.03)
That's a bad ass blend, man. Meaning like we're moving into this world where like a lot of the stuff that's going to be built, we still need smart people. We still definitely need smart people. But like I think what's so cool about AI is like, you also need awesome people, humans that are going to bring most of these AI solutions that last mile, man. That's still human to human. That's still being able to do that last bit of that touch. So it's interesting that a lot of the background that the folks on the Deep Dive team, they come from that type of world.

Sagi Reuven (16:13.408)
Yes.

Sagi Reuven (16:19.911)
Exactly, yeah.

Sagi Reuven (16:31.361)
Being creative is much more important now. Everyone can build software, everyone can build apps. So being creative is way more important and being open-minded to listen to things that might evolve into something that even me, like on a regular, like any other product, I would probably unqualify something. But sometimes you...

Adrian Brady-Cesana (16:36.91)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yep. Yep.

Sagi Reuven (16:58.633)
You understand the use case and then you can offer a solution and then things evolve. And that can turn into like a huge contract eventually, but you have to be on a listening mode in that phase of where we are with the tech.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (17:08.206)
Thank you, sir.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (17:15.374)
Absolutely, 100%, 100 % agree. If, with AI, and I'm asking everybody this, so I'm not putting you on the spot, Ziggy, but like.

For this new year, have things changed with your guys team strategy? Are you continuing to hire? Are you hiring different things? Do you have a different set of expectations now for what? So you already laid out this, you are creative, awesome, open, like human people. What changes with AI? And I'm gonna be asking everybody this question here. One or two big things that your entire leadership team already came into this year knowing, all right, for anybody that joins this company from this point forward,

Sagi Reuven (17:49.856)
Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (17:56.694)
Is there anything like that that you guys are kind of thinking about in your leadership meetings? Is there anything that you've got to automate some decisions on?

Sagi Reuven (17:59.735)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Two major, major things that I that for me are key. I'll give some background in my previous role, I built the business development team for for the FinTech company that I mentioned earlier, and I hired like crazy, like I would hire four BDRs a month and firing to, you know, who's crazy.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (18:25.112)
Yeah.

Sagi Reuven (18:25.665)
Constantly. was a big team all the time. 15 people, 20 people, 18 people, interns, digital marketers.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (18:31.382)
And you were just pre-performing out to the bottom third, the bottom third, just constantly performance managing them out.

Sagi Reuven (18:37.903)
Everything was a numbers game. Everyone should make a hundred calls per day. Boom. And this was like, again, crunching it all to, it was a numbers game. And I think this, this can no longer run in this, especially in our industry. I'm hiring more senior people. I need people that have better understanding of the industry. Why? Because I want to sharp shoot. I don't want the large number. Like.

Now everyone can do a large number because you can put an AISDR and reach out to 50,000 people, right?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (19:10.312)
And we both see it every damn day in our inboxes, man. You see it and you're like, this is so not even close that why did you even shoot that arrow? Yep.

Sagi Reuven (19:17.195)
Yeah. Numbers, numbers. Now numbers are easy. If I buy a license to a power dialer, I can make 1000 calls per day with one person. So, but who cares? I mean, it's, it's no longer an interesting way to, find what you need. So you need to be, to find people that are more senior that can really understand business cases and read into what the company really does and have a conversation and not a sales demo.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (19:24.438)
Absolutely. Yep. Yep.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (19:37.133)
Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (19:47.116)
Yeah, right. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Sagi Reuven (19:48.041)
Okay, that's one thing. The second thing is focus a little bit more on rev ops, whether you hire internally or you want someone to do it as project.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (20:00.066)
Like CXE, you could have CXE come in and run your rev off, Saghi.

Sagi Reuven (20:02.871)
Absolutely. Yeah, that's amazing. I think we also see that with some of our clients, by the way, that what AI changed, it goes back to what you mentioned earlier about the people, is that now service companies are becoming more important in a sense, because everyone has access to GPT. Everyone has access to be agents with Gemini. But the question is,

deploy it in real time, like real time, real life applications. And that's where you need service. You see, need people to actually make it work. And then this is like the thing that we need to, we need to, to tackle and you need to have someone dedicated for it. If you think that you will manage to implement something like this on your own with a few clicks, it's going to fail. In my, in my view, you need.

a company like CX that knows how to take it A to Z because shiny demos are not the same as the real, yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (21:09.602)
The real battle, the real world of battle. Wait, real quick. I think...

By the end of last year, I kept hearing something very interesting from many of our guests who are coming from big established mature companies that have already figured out their product market fit. They're already doing tens of millions of dollars. They've already got hundreds to a thousand employees. They've figured their shit out. They know what they're doing. Now they're just growing, right? Some of our smaller guests that are building tomorrow's leading companies, which are still super dope, and you're taking bets on which one of them are gonna be real or which are not. But one thing that I found fascinating, Sikki, by the end of last year is,

Sagi Reuven (21:44.567)
you

Adrian Brady-Cesana (21:48.238)
Started to hear a trend with a lot of these like incredible younger founders that are building tomorrow's companies come on the show and they talk about AI, AI, AI. They talk about automation, automation, automation. But you just said something that I am fucking completely all about, which is you said, Adrian, I'm moving more back towards like, I'd rather have more senior people. I'd rather have a smaller team that's more sophisticated, higher quality, larger motor. You got a stronger motor, right? I got a bigger motor.

Sagi Reuven (22:13.931)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (22:16.814)
And I kept hearing this automation, automation, automation thing. And then what I think is, as you just said that, you've been selling for decades now, you've been building selling teams. I've been building customer experience, customer success, customer service teams, inside sales teams for 20 plus years now. think a lot of companies, some companies might be able to work if they think that in the very, very early phase before they figured anything out, they have an army of customers, before they have a huge team, before they have all this complexity that comes into every business once start to grow.

Automations are cool and automating around the gate, certain things are fine, but you miss a huge opportunity when a lot of the best and the brightest companies were built over last 10 years. So 10 years ago, you had extremely smart humans touching simple tickets, simple calls, simple emails, simple SMS, simple sales meetings. But guess what?

those really smart people that were doing those early simple things and not worrying about just let's automate, let's automate, let's automate. They got human touch after human touch after human touch and then they got really good at thinking about how to start codifying the stuff together, how to start thinking about which things might very much be worth automating. Which things do we never automate because we fucking sell every single time we get that one type of medium, we sell 80 % right there. So no, no, no, we're gonna try to always get in front of a person right there.

Sagi Reuven (23:31.211)
Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (23:37.806)
I think that this could be a miss. also think, and I'm not being an agent, promise you, but I am 40 now, so I am getting a little older, a little wiser. You guys can see the gray in my beard. But I think younger folks are very comfortable not talking to people. But the world still, guys, like you want to build a business, you want to grow a team, you want to lead a team, want to be a C-level executive. You're talking to people every damn day. You're talking to more people that you don't want to talk to than you do want to talk to to be able to get to the people that you should and need to be talking

Sagi Reuven (23:37.834)
Exactly.

Sagi Reuven (23:50.775)
Haha.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (24:07.526)
And like, I just think that like in this world of AI, I keep hearing that. think that's another thing that I'm really gonna pound on this year to get out, just to hear how other people maybe think about that or how they respond to it. Because it's an opportunity, it can be an opportunity both ways. Some people might find a massive opportunity by avoiding the automations and really still doing the human touch stuff in the beginning to make sure that you're actually building a strategic roadmap that makes sense for downstream scale. And then some simpler stuff, I get it, man. If you can build a bullshit app.

Sagi Reuven (24:34.31)
you

Adrian Brady-Cesana (24:36.152)
that automates everything for really lightweight stuff that is non-personal that people don't ever mind just banging out right here. Go ahead, do that all damn day. And I think there's gonna be a lot of cool companies that do very simple non-personal things like that that might blow up. for like, depending on what type of company you have, if you've got like some of the stuff that you guys do at DeepDub, like you're working with huge, huge businesses. You're working, some of your partners and some of the solutions that you guys are bringing, AWS, Google, Microsoft, video, like come on, guys are working with some massive, massive.

Sagi Reuven (24:48.587)
Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (25:05.42)
And then some of the clients stuff that you do with the studios and stuff like that. Those are still people, man. Like they're still gonna care about dollars and cents and they're always gonna care about brass tacks. like those people wanna work, as you said earlier, with like awesome teams to get it, that become extension partners of their business.

Sagi Reuven (25:19.81)
but I also need to, I'd add to that. You need to ask yourself, if you want to make a decision, if you need to be more face to face and like that, ask yourself, if my champion will get my project green light.

and it fails, will they fire him for this failure?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (25:50.594)
Interesting.

Sagi Reuven (25:51.463)
If the answer is yes, then you definitely need to be in front of that person because he must trust you that you will be there for him. And then it goes to this customer experience thing, because when you go big and those level of contracts with new tech that are like innovation and all that stuff, and people need to know they can count on you after you're selling.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (26:01.432)
Trust, it's a relationship, you're building relationship.

Sagi Reuven (26:21.353)
Okay. That's the, you saw me something now make it work. That's where I think you get your real, your real success. I think this is what maybe again, to the, what we are seeing with AI that on one hand, took us to, wow, it's all shiny new and so on. But again, it's not so easy to implement that from a self-service kind of play. It's a completely different story.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (26:22.626)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (26:50.83)
Absolutely. 100%. And before we do this, actually perfect segue, let's jump into the second pillar of tools. What you just said could not be more spot on. I think we're already seeing it. Actually, I was just on a pretty cool podcast last week, GoTo or former Lug Me and GoTo, big company. So they released their Pulse of Work 2025 survey towards the end of the year.

Sagi Reuven (27:11.052)
Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (27:19.246)
One of the biggest things that I was prepared to kind of talk about on that podcast is, I'm going to actually, this is another thing I want to start guys. You're to hear me talk about this all damn year, but like, there's a couple interesting things. There's, there's number one, 62 % of employees say that AI has been significantly over height. Most employees, 78 % are using AI technologies ranging from free solutions.

Sagi Reuven (27:29.911)
Okay. Okay.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (27:47.726)
to specialized internal tools. Yet many feel these tools aren't living up to the promises. So a couple of things, I'm calling this out because there's still a massive opportunity for educating the world. And by the way, educating smart people. It's like, one of the big things that we've spent all December on, our team at CXE was like updating all of our, all of our go-to-market stuff, updating all of our materials. And then we've got a weird thing. We do this weird trifecta of.

Sagi Reuven (28:07.703)
you Thank

Adrian Brady-Cesana (28:15.074)
We have content, get awesome people like you to come on the show that we can share the stories, learn, catalog, chronicle. So constantly chronically and information and chronically and then bucketing how different leaders and different businesses are doing really cool things. Then we got this partnership thing. Then we've got our managed services and our consultation. And it's weird, but like one of the big things that we realized, one of the biggest pivots that we're making going into this year, we're still doing our CX and CS and rev ops.

optimization consultation and strategy.

We see the biggest opportunity helping to support, sorry, partner by supporting, coaching, working alongside, and then feeding some of the live updates and information to what I believe, like I've been saying this for the last couple months on the show, like in the next thousand days, I think you're very clearly gonna see which trove of business leaders. I'm a big fan of the Pareto rule. So let's just say which 20 % of business leaders are gonna literally come up to the top, meaning

Sagi Reuven (29:07.511)
you

Adrian Brady-Cesana (29:18.958)
They're already nights and I don't kids go to bed. All right, cool. Honey, I'm going to go. I'm go to the desk. I'm going to fuck with chat. GPT for an hour or I'm going to play with Gemini. I'm going to do some advanced solutions. I'm going to, I'm to go, honey, I'm going play with replica for an hour. You might not even be technical. You might've been a, a 20 year sales leader who can absolutely get up in front of 150 % sales team. Rock it out. can sell you've sold hundreds of millions of dollars of shit over all the years that you've, uh, you've managed and built teams. I, we see this opportunity for the next thousand days.

there's a huge trouble for the people that are gonna absolutely be leading the world in the future. Once things start to, once things start to siphon out, they still need help because there's still the ones that are running their businesses team every day. like everyone is listening around you, you guys know what I'm talking about. Like you want to learn stuff, you want to get you done at work. Oftentimes you do your day, then you go home and you deal with your family, your wife, your kids. And then they need that like special work. Dude, that's like nighttime work where you're getting up early before, before anyone's up. It's like.

Sagi Reuven (29:52.715)
Yeah.

Sagi Reuven (30:11.703)
Hmm.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (30:17.506)
we see a world where that's gonna get harder because the press is gonna get harder. Meaning the expectations on the world and the universe thanks to Amazon and thanks to Google and thanks to everything being right fucking now, which is fine. We live in a very nice part of time, but like that's gonna spill over to all these other industries and all sorts of other businesses. And we see an opportunity where being able to build a business or being able have a community that folks can opt into that can at least give them some of the cheat codes or some of the.

the quick into the dirties or give them, or then the other thing is this busy people, oftentimes they can't do super duper deep and dirty master classes. They've got to be able to consume things quick to be able to learn and then to be able to bring that learning right into their business tomorrow morning and iterate. So, I, but I love, I love kind of like that, that, that, that change. And then it fits with a lot of stuff you're talking about, but with tools for a second, what type of tools, um, as you guys have built deep dive have really sort of, um, invested in the most.

or what type of tools have really allowed you guys to continue to find more customers, keep the customers that you have happy, and then really continue to build and grow the business.

Sagi Reuven (31:18.135)
I think one thing is around customer service. We're using a dev rev and we build the entire infrastructure behind it in a way that helps us to funnel requests. since we are also surveying some clients as a, like a dubbing service provider,

There's also like a lot of operations around the studio production. So we are, we are managing that through another way and we invested in integrating with some of the clients. So everything will be constantly visible. In terms of sales, my main interest and still very bullish on that this is the right way to go is to ingest as much intent that you can.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (31:51.255)
Okay.

Sagi Reuven (32:17.023)
like social listeners and trying to find. And it brings me back to what I said about the hiring thing, right? When you have senior people, they know how to track things. They tend to read the news, like be very involved in what's going on, listening to podcasts, right? I mean, that's a part of it. You might listen to something, think about a new creative idea, then come up with another company that you can reach out to, right?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (32:30.06)
Absolutely.

Sagi Reuven (32:45.068)
because there's, don't know, their CEO said something.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (32:45.11)
Absolutely. I podcast or the best way to do selling if you listen to somebody on a podcast, and then you hear them say intimate things that they prepared for that podcast. And then instead of doing a shitty template and email you literally write, yo, so yeah, I heard you on CX Chronicles podcast you said minute X you said XYZ that's fucking brilliant. Let me know if you can chat. You're probably not gonna delete that email you might not answer it right away.

Sagi Reuven (33:07.673)
Yeah. No.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (33:10.99)
you're gonna go back to that email and then finally on the third time you're be like, right, I'll answer this Adrian guy, here we go. guys, that's a brilliant way of getting in front of somebody or again, that personalized part of, I just shooting a thousand arrows anymore, shoot 10 really tight arrows.

Sagi Reuven (33:26.583)
All right.

If someone is reaching out to me and I have to say like again, I'm risking my mailbox by saying that, but I have to admit, I read almost every email. So I purchased a few tools from a completely cold email outreach, right? Like someone reached out to me with the right solution for a problem that I was actually facing. I think people tend to

Maybe it's because of all the tools, but people in sales, demand gen and outbound and around that completely miss the personalization. And they think about personalizing for someone instead of personalizing for the problem that this person is facing. I used to tell that to my BDRs. Like if you are not asked before you call someone, ask yourself, can I help this person improve?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (34:10.156)
Yep.

Sagi Reuven (34:26.997)
his metrics at work and make him happy and get a promotion. If the answer is no, then either you are not prepared or he's not the right person to call to. Right? Like.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (34:36.686)
was just going to say it goes, it validates what you're doing moving forward, which all of the BDR, many of the BDR teams that I've managed or I've built in the past.

To your point, it's one thing to build a team of humans if you just need to hit numbers. Oh, okay, the strategic goal is, okay, we need to make 5,000 phone calls this month so that I need, okay, I need that many people. And then maybe you're hitting your goals and so I've been converting, but if you want the latter part of what you just said to be doing pre-connection qualification, which then means you're gonna get smaller numbers, but it's gonna be a higher.

quantity or a higher percentage of qualified contacts Guys hit pause and go back and return that because we're still watching some of you guys just blasting and it's silly and then it's that another way You're missing opportunities. You're missing opportunities and then you're also You're getting false information of false signals on what your pipeline and your deal flow and all that stuff actually looks like you know, so you Talk about process. How have you kind of?

Sagi Reuven (35:40.484)
That's the risk. That's the risk.

Sagi Reuven (35:45.431)
We're not using any special tool. It's like a dynamic presentation that we keep getting back to. We have two different go-to markets and

Adrian Brady-Cesana (35:47.278)
At DeepDub, how have you and the team sort of gone about wrangling process, building playbooks, establishing standard operating procedures? Is there a tool that you use for it? Does someone own it? Talk about like how you guys kind of think about process.

Sagi Reuven (36:13.527)
We maintain one for each. And we keep getting back to that list when we have new information that we learn from. We also have a product marketing manager that tends to collect information from competitors and bring it back. And then we can ingest it to some kind of a bottle card. Yeah, it's like competitor A, competitor B, some kind of frequently asked questions that

Adrian Brady-Cesana (36:30.508)
Nice.

Bottle card?

Sagi Reuven (36:44.277)
You you tend to keep on seeing again and again. Another topic, again, goes back to this AI thing. It's is about also about the legal process, just something that we also learned along the years. Like we we saw what people are asking and we we put that in front of them. Right. It was always a part of the legal agreement, but we put that in front of them. So it will reduce the.

the friction and, explain to me. It's like, so now we realize like what people care about. We understand what, what, people are, are, are looking for, in the process. And we try to make that accessible as early as we can in the process to just to reduce the questions, but like to just give them all the information. And I think clients also appreciate when you do that, because then it feels like you were also giving something like an

Adrian Brady-Cesana (37:12.28)
Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (37:32.141)
Absolutely.

Sagi Reuven (37:41.137)
some kind of education because a big part of what I'm telling them, it may not be, they may decide to buy from a competitor, but I'm trying to give them a level of information that they would again see me as someone that know what he's talking about. And I think they appreciate that. Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (38:00.494)
I think that absolutely 100 % the right types of customers, the ICPs are the ones that going to really, you're to build your business upon are always going to appreciate that. There's a lot of times where with CXE clients might dequeue themselves from us because they realized, wait a minute, you guys aren't just like a, you're gonna to take a hundred dollars an hour IT outsourced fix my HubSpot tickets. No, no, no. We build that shit from scratch and then we help to deploy it to your team. And then we build the playbooks and then we do content to support.

the training and the utilization of it. And then we're doing, we're literally aiding the sales team. We're doing essentially information action ability reports. We're doing dashboards. We're doing dashboards and reports. But I say information and action ability reports because we're not just building shitty dashboards either. We're trying to dashboards humans can act upon, right? And that's a big thing. it's like, and good sales leaders know this all the time. Every good sales leader's got some nerd sitting on the team who understands how to make math actionable, understandable.

Sagi Reuven (38:59.794)
Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (39:00.05)
digestible for the rest of us dummies who can go out in the world, we can go talk to anybody and we could maybe even sell you the shirt off of our back. When you show a certain math and certain analytics, if it's not actionable and we don't understand the why or what do I do with this thing, it's not helpful. Let's jump into the fourth and final pillar of feedback. You just started to say like, because what I was hearing is purposefully like the listening and the learning. How have you guys deep dive, deep dive, how have you really kind of thought, I'm gonna break some of these two parts.

How have you guys really kind of thought about how you manage all the customer feedback that you get from your clients and even, you're the CRO man, so like, you probably learn a ton from the people that you don't close too, but I'd love for you to spend like a minute or two talking about how you guys kind of utilize customer feedback and I'd love to understand how do you sort of utilize employee feedback. Spend a couple minutes talking about feedback.

Sagi Reuven (39:40.754)
Absolutely. All right, so.

We use a tool for product related calls. We use a tool called Dovetail. It's a pretty good one when you want to collect information that is not sales related. You can think about it like Gong for, but for product managers in a sense, like for a product interview. It will pick up pains and things that clients would care about that are product related, like features or things like that. And you would probably do that in a later...

Adrian Brady-Cesana (40:10.754)
Cool, cool.

Sagi Reuven (40:21.335)
a stage of the engagement, right? Like you might want to do that when they already signed or they already started working with you. And so this is one thing that we do with some of the clients, again, depend on the level. We have weekly calls where we like continuously collect feedback and trying to create different benchmarks that we can.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (40:26.594)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sagi Reuven (40:48.777)
It's like what I said about building that value, you know, even if they are not measuring something, we are still trying to show them, you know, the continuous progress, what has improved. And again, with models, with, with, with AI models, makes a huge impact. Like sometimes I would just brief a client on the new things that we released in the model and how it will impact his future work or what else can he do now that like new stuff that they can do. So.

In those sessions, we try to collect the feedback on difficulties to implement, where is it breaking? So this dovetail is the platform. The rest is done in close conversations between the teams. We usually get a lot of information from customer success, obviously, because they there in the field, like getting...

Adrian Brady-Cesana (41:41.347)
Yep.

Sagi Reuven (41:45.207)
And we document all in like a ticketing system. And sometimes we convert stuff to features, obviously, like we sometimes convert stuff to features.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (41:46.508)
Front lines, baby.

Absolutely.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (41:55.982)
I love that there first of all, there'll be a couple of guests at the end of last year. There's gonna be a lot of AI businesses that are focused on some of that meaning. Look, I think a lot of people are gonna do what we're talking about where whether people want to hear it or not, might. Teams will probably get a little leaner or say a lot of people are gonna do what you just said brother where no, I'm just gonna have a smaller team of people that fucking get it and they've already done it and then they're the people that me and my leadership team.

actually understand it makes sense to invest in how we, whether they, and then this is the thing guys, you got to understand this, because I'm one of them. we've, some of the shit that we're building in the last year, I'm a non-technical founder. I've been working with customers and leading teams and building teams and managing teams my entire career, right? But I've been around a lot of technology and I'm not, I'm not a total dumb dumb, but like I've paid attention, but I've always really kind of just had friends. had these brilliant product friends. had these brilliant analytical and data science friends that.

Sagi Reuven (42:51.895)
Yeah, absolutely.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (42:54.816)
I would rap with on some of this stuff. I was aware of it and learned a lot about it, but I also had respect for the different areas of subject matter expertise. Meaning some of my friends that are sort of the best, most incredible builders, or some of my most mathematically inclined friends that I've ever met, they probably can't necessarily go have conversations like someone like me. And I'm not saying that disparaging, I'm not saying that like, in a closed conference room or in a bar, like, because with me they're fucking awesome and they can talk about everything and they'll put them in front of...

Sagi Reuven (43:21.079)
Yeah, I know

Adrian Brady-Cesana (43:24.366)
27 people in a conference room and then maybe it's a little different. And my point is like, think that like, there's going to be a lot of really cool tools that are coming out that the people that are going to be best fit, probably smaller, more sophisticated teams supported the right way. And then this is fricking brilliant. We hit a lot of good points in today's episode, but by the way, whether that's supported in-house or whether that means companies start getting comfortable with having certain outsourced partners.

that are the experts in doing some of this stuff to really kind of, and then here's the simple analogy I'm gonna use, guys. I've said it in a few shows recently, but the New York Yankees, Manchester United, they got the best trainers in the world, right? Some of the biggest CEOs on planet earth that are running the Fortune 100s, they've got business coaches, therapists, psychologists, checking them, checking them. They probably don't listen. They probably do whatever they want anyway, but they're at least listening and they're using it. And then you've got like,

Sagi Reuven (43:56.789)
Yes.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (44:22.766)
Like all of these examples of different things, sports, business, bands. Bands have the best managers and engineers and producers. you could literally have Beyonce still gets told about music constantly. So like, it's pretty normal in all these other areas. So like, I think as part, one of the big changes with workplace and employees and then how do businesses differentiate and really truly have a competitive advantage and how do you keep the best players? That's the other thing.

If there is gonna be this movement, I'm just gonna have smaller teams of smarter people. Okay, how are you gonna keep them? what about, some of us are gonna get good at this shit, dude. So some of us are gonna be like, so then that's gonna become a whole other new weird thing that people are gonna have to be thinking about. It's gonna be fun. We're in an interesting part of where this is all gonna go. It's a roller coaster. So this is fantastic. Before we start winding down, couple things. Anything.

Sagi Reuven (44:50.763)
Hmm.

Sagi Reuven (45:00.407)
That's a good question.

Sagi Reuven (45:08.853)
Yeah, you have to, it's a roller coaster. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (45:19.394)
that you want to call out or anything that you'd like to see extention about any upcoming events or launches or updates or big things that you want everyone to know about that you guys are super excited about at deep down right now or that's coming up in the near future. Anything that you want to see extention to know about.

Sagi Reuven (45:34.283)
Yeah, absolutely. We're going to be at the GTC. We have a booth this year at the Nvidia GTC. I think this one is going to be very interesting, all about the agentic stuff, also in the context of media and entertainment, animation. So it's going to be a blast. So I'm pretty excited about Nvidia GTC. That's my next big thing.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (45:55.864)
Love it. Where can people either get in touch with you, my friend, or get in touch with your team if they want to learn more about some of the awesome things that you guys are doing at Deep Dub.

Sagi Reuven (46:05.695)
And you best go to the DeepDub website, see all the different applications, things that we do with our voice model, great real life examples, and reach out to us.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (46:17.442)
love it. Sigi, this has been an absolute pleasure, man. I'm so excited and happy that you were able to come on the show, share your guys' story. Super cool company. And obviously, you guys are going to be one of the businesses that's very well positioned right now for all the things that are to come. a huge thank you for joining CX Chronicles. And I look forward to meeting you, keeping in touch, my friend, after the fact here.

Sagi Reuven (46:36.183)
Thank you so much. Thanks, Edwin.