Matt Serna Podcast Transcript
Matt Serna joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Matt Serna. Matt Serna is head of Go-To-Market at Lightfield, the fastest growing AI native CRM. At Lightfield, he focuses on working with startups to deploy agents that help acquire, engage, and retain new customers. Prior to Lightfield, he served as chief marketing officer at Replicant, a market leader in AI customer service, and at Notable, a healthcare AI company that automates millions of back office workflows for healthcare providers.
Matt works with transformative category defining AI companies to accelerate their growth. Well, good afternoon, Matt. Welcome to the show.
Matt Serna: Happy to be here.
Brian Thomas: Awesome, Matt. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Traversing globes the globe today a little bit just from San Francisco to Kansas City, not a big deal, but I appreciate you making the time.
And Matt, if you don’t mind jumping into your first question here, you’ve built a career going from MuleSoft to Notable, to Replicant, and now Lightfield, each a category defining AI company at an earlier and earlier stage. What draws you to these inflection point companies and what made Lightfield the right next chapter?
Matt Serna: I think it’s a great place to start, Brian. At, at the end of the day, as I reflect back on my career and how I decide the, the companies and the people I wanna work with, ultimately, I look at what’s going to give me the most energy and, and what’s gonna help me do the best work I can. And, and really that’s, that comes down to taking massive swings in big markets that are ready to be disrupted, where there’s a lot of people whose lives can be improved if we can be successful in our mission.
That’s what gives me energy. And so reflecting back on, on those companies, you know, Notable, we were taking on all of the manual paper-filled, fax-filled back office healthcare workflows and replacing that with AI to make healthcare more accessible and affordable for folks. To, to Replicate, where we were helping a lot of large consumer brands replace old school customer service, where you wait on hold for 20 minutes to talk to somebody, to, with AI agents, where you can instantly have your question or inquiry resolved, to, to Lightfield, which is the category leading agentic CRM, which is poised to do in the AI world what Salesforce did for, for the cloud world, and that’s what I’m so excited to talk about today.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Really appreciate that, and I liked the, really your, your career philos- philosophy. When you jumped into this, you made that statement, what’s gonna give you the most energy, right? And you tackled those problems that were notable and meaningful and truly making the world a better place, which obviously fulfills you.
And of course, now working at Lightfield which is awesome that, as you mentioned, that category leading agentic AI system, and I know you guys built that from the ground up, so that’s awesome, and we’ll get right into that. Matt, your traditional CRMs were essentially built on the assumption that humans would manually log everything.
Lightfield’s premise is that AI should automatically capture every customer interaction from calls, emails, meetings, messages, and structure them into a living system of record without anyone touching a field. How big is the data quality problem in legacy CRMs, and how much revenue is left on the table because of it?
Matt Serna: Well, it, it’s absolutely massive, and you think back about, you know, the, the real purpose of, of the CRM- Pre-AI, it was used more as a tool to understand and manage the business for management layers and finance to forecast how a business is growing. But it didn’t really do anything for the people that are actually selling the product.
And without any incentive as the person selling the product, talking to customers to go and engage with the system, you end up with a lot of incomplete, old or stale data. And in a world where AI agents are, are so powerful and the models get better every single day, it’s become a real missed opportunity.
‘Cause what we’ve seen is that conceptually, theoretically, the agents are smart enough to go perform almost any go-to-market task from researching accounts, writing follow-up emails, managing your pipeline for you. But it can only do that if it’s given the right context and the right data, which you just don’t have with a, a pre-agentic CRM.
And that’s really the problem that we’ve invested in solving at Lightfield
Brian Thomas: Amazing. Really appreciate that, and you’re absolutely right. I don’t know how many CRMs have come and gone, but… And there’s some big ones, and, and everybody’s trying to get that market share. But the pre-AI CRM’s definitely just where there is a knowledge base for many of the departments except for those in sales, right?
So, I like how agentic AI is very powerful, and it’s able to do a lot of the tasks and tie different tables, databases or companies together to be able to fully serve the person that is serving the customer at the time. So, thank you. Matt, you’ve made the case that most AI CRMs are just a layer on top of a broken foundation, and that if the underlying database is empty because humans never entered the data, the AI has nothing to work with.
How do you explain that structural difference to a skeptical buyer who’s already been burned by an AI feature that didn’t deliver, and what’s the moment in a demo where it really clicks?
Matt Serna: That’s a great question, where I, I would say it, it actually it’s… I think the phrase you used, AI feature, actually explains everything.
What, what we have found is that when you try and add an AI feature to a, an old system, you run into many of the problems I, I talked about, where you have the AI reasoning off of incomplete context or structure or, or missing data. A- and this is why we really believe that the, the entire system of record that you use to, to, to manage your business has to change in order to realize the benefits of AI.
I- in terms of how I explain the difference, I, I’m actually a believer of show not tell, and, and recently one thing we’ve been doing is we actually set up an environment for the people we’re talking to, to experience the power of Lightfield prior to ever entering into a, a financial engagement with us.
Agents are so powerful now that they can actually very quickly set up an environment and move data over from a legacy CRM, and that’s really given, you know, t- transformed our, our go-to-market so that it’s… I- I’m not in the business of trying to convince people why we’re a better product. I’m in the business of, of, of giving people our product to touch and feel and play with to, to see that difference and experience it directly for themselves
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Yes. And I was reading a- about your migrations from existing platforms into Lightfield, and it is amazing you talked about that just now with that the power of AI and what it can do and how fast it can migrate, and it’s just, you know, really you’re telling the customer, “Hey, in 30 minutes, maybe a little more you’ll be working,” right, “in, in your new CRM,” and I think that’s amazing.
And you’re right about this AI feature. We’ve been talking about this now for three, three years at least. It’s a buzzword, and it might sound sexy, but many times AI is just bolted onto an existing system, and in Lightfield’s case completely different, and I really appreciate your thoughts on that.
And Matt, as we look ahead to the future, right, as AI matures and the boundary between human and machine action in sales continues to blur, where do you see the CRM category in five years, and what does the winning AI native platform need to get right today to define what that future really looks like?
Matt Serna: Well, I think five years is, is, is probably a longer time horizon than, that I can forecast. If you, if you think back to five years from now, 2021, the world was a very different place, and I’m sure the world will be a very different place five years from now. What I can say is I don’t think in the five-year time horizon, I think in right now.
Every, every business is up for grabs, and the companies that are able to leverage AI to scale are going to out-compete those that are not. I, I believe it’s the single most important thing that a company can invest in. And, and the reason why is because the– If you actually break down, you asked about boundary between human and machine, if you break down the actual tasks that a sales professional engages in, in their day-to-day, I would venture to guess that over 70% of them are, are tasks that can be completed by AI.
Researching, prospecting, summarizing, updating records, following up, drafting proposals, drafting RFPs. These are all things that agents can do better than humans instantly, and the businesses that realize this are gonna be able to scale much more quickly because it’s it’s much easier to scale agents than to go and hire the people that you need to grow your business.
And, and so I, I believe that we are very quickly moving towards a w- a world where the, the way in which companies go to market changes, where the majority of work done that is customer-facing in a company will be done by agents, not humans. And the reason I believe this is because there, there are already companies figuring this out, Brian.
I work with them every single day, and these companies have a decisive competitive advantage over people who have not figured this out yet. Their competitors are either gonna have to figure it out themselves or are gonna go out of business because the, the advantages to operating your business in such a way are, are so, so dramatic.
Brian Thomas: Amazing. Thank you. And I, I would agree with you there, Matt. You said five years is probably too long to make any accurate predictions at this point. The way AI is completely just flipping things upside down overnight. I like the stat you used, up to 70% of day-to-day tasks by salespeople abs- absolutely can be automated.
I can see that today, and it’s only gonna get better in the future. Obviously easier to scale agents versus traditional processes or teams, and, and right now is the time, and if, if you’re just now thinking about AI, I think you’re probably already behind the eight-ball, so I appreciate your insights.
And Matt, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Matt Serna: That was awesome. Thanks, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Matt Serna Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
